Stéphane Zaech paints people and their clothes, landscapes, flowers and strange trees whose branches are chopped so that they remain within the confines of the painting. The people too are bizarre. Their anatomy has taken liberties barely possible in nature. What has happened? Who are they, these ladies with the postures of statues but the faces of a Picasso? What are they doing with those twisted arms and all those eyes? Is this a joke? Certainly not. On the contrary, it is a trap, because this is not the subject of the artwork.

The exhibition retraces the last ten years of Stéphane Zaech’s painting. Since 1986, his work, which draws on art history and literary allusions, has become increasingly freer. He paints colour, the joy of the paintbrush etching the canvas, the joy of the cloud etching the sky. He paints today’s world with the techniques of the old masters. Without lengthy discourses on art, Zaech makes light of references and of reality to simply show painting itself, both as work and as play. The play consists in seeing things differently, in looking beyond the obvious. Nefertiti, for example, refers less to an Egyptian queen than to a piece of jazz music in which the Miles Davis Quartet reverses the roles of the melody and the rhythm section. In Zaech’s work, it is perhaps the roles assigned to the subjects represented and to painting as a medium that are reversed.

Stéphane Zaech was born in 1966 in Vevey. He lives and works in Montreux.

The exhibition was supported by Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art and Sophie und Karl Binding Stiftung