Sebastien Pauwels is a sculptor with a fascination for painting.
In his works, the brushstroke holds an essential place and once volumes emerge, they exists by chromatic expression.
His first artworks, sculpted in the round abstract volumes from 2010-2011, defy traditional notions of stability and verticality, of mass and hollowness. They explore the medium’s intimate surface through fluctuations of texture and color. Soon afterwards, the white wall seduced the artist into hanging flattened boulders as well as intricate little plaster pieces, smooth and thick reminding one of sculpture by their weight and their rendering of stylized rocks or deep da Vinci inspired caves. These were followed by pictorial concrete pieces, scans of stones or of a fragmented topography: three-dimensional and flat surfaces came into confrontation and led to experimentation; no matter the process, their sooty appearance gave them a tactile quality.
