Born in 1970 in Rognac, Cédric Bouteiller is an artist who lives and works in the South of France. In high school, he moved towards illustration and graphic experimentation, in particular by drawing inspiration from artists like Gustave Klimt or Salvador Dali. Slowly, Cédric begins to work on the painted material where he is especially passionate about the texture that he manipulates with a knife or spatula.
In the first year of Art History, the artist will completely engage in painting to the detriment of drawing. His conception of painting is simple: color, material and movement. “We had to forget the illustrative gesture, its school codes, its opposites and its technical limits. To better go towards painting. A painting that must have turned out to be abstract, even though I didn't know the meaning of the word at the time.” For him, pure figuration remains embodied by photography. Today, photography and painting overlap in his work, these two movements manage to coexist in one and the same work.
Often compared to an alchemist, Cédric Bouteiller speculates on oxidation, hardening or evaporation. The slightest residue can feed his paintings. In his workshop, drawing tables, worktops dedicated to his polyepoxides, paint trays and cans of thinners mingle. Collector and pioneer, his urban walks are an integral part of his artistic process: the slightest visual singularity is captured by his camera, which is always close at hand. Scribbled notes, pigments by the hundreds, digital data storage cards, artbooks by the kilo, inked
notebooks, monographs or circus posters. Cédric's workshop is a veritable junkyard of objects to create: this accumulation is necessary for him because it serves to give birth to ideas or to raise materials.
World famous artist, Cédric Bouteiller is exhibited in Paris, Bordeaux, Mykonos, Athens, Venice, Los Angeles, New York and Shanghai. Coming from a family of workers, Cédric was a rebellious young boy, stubborn and passionate about drawing. Thanks to his skills, he obtained a professional study certificate in industrial design. At that time, he was confronted with dimensional constraints, the geometry of the parts, the use of rotring but also the apprehension of shapes and volumes in space, which still marks his works today.