Femmes en manteaux (2023) Collages by Frédéric Villbrandt

My artistic vocation began around my seventeenth year, when I came across an abandoned family camera. Compact automatic devices were making their appearance and the one I found by chance in a cupboard had, despite the prestige of the brand and model, already been classified and relegated to the category of overly complicated devices. For my greatest pleasure! While practicing photography and the black and white laboratory, I introduced myself to painting and drawing. And a few years later I entered the School of Fine Arts (Ensb-a Paris) and a few years later, I left with my diploma in hand.
Since then, I have practiced, as much as I can these three disciplines of drawing, painting and photography.
In addition, I was a graphic designer for around fifteen years. Recently, I stopped. Let's be honest, it's the graphics that let me down. Without regrets. But I wanted to keep something of this experience. Continue to produce work that is colored by my time in this world of graphic arts. At least that was the original idea. Because quite quickly, I felt the need to move away from the computer which was, at that time again, one of my main working tools and which I certainly sat in front of for too long. The need to physically manipulate images has become irrepressible. Accepting the inevitable imperfections of manual cutting and pasting had an almost therapeutic effect. And the fascination that I can feel in front of the pile of images spread out in front of me has the virtue of plunging me into meditative states that I can no longer do without.
Collage is therefore my most recent practice. Both a source of potential inspiration, formal research and art sufficient in itself. By practicing collage, I often have the feeling of having pieces of reality in my hands, of times and spaces totally foreign to each other, which come to meet, to associate according to chaotic laws. Happy accidents, in the practice of collage, have a particular taste. I'm not looking for a particular style or way of doing things. I watch for results that I would not have expected, associations that I could never have thought of. I want to try. Sometimes, it is the game of linking together pieces of images that come to hand that leads to the result of which I am, ultimately, only an agent.
Here is what I can tell you about the work which I present here.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary French Artists