Fireplace (2017) Painting by Yvan Favre

I paint moments that make no noise.

Simple gestures, a turned gaze, a body waiting without posing. I'm not looking for the spectacular, or even to tell a story. What I'm pursuing is that zone of silence between two breaths, that moment when something surfaces, without bursting. A nothing, but charged. An almost nothing that weighs.

I work from photographs, yes. But photography, for me, is only a starting point. A way of freezing what escapes me. Then, I reconstruct. I choose, I discard, I reinvent. Painting begins where the image ends.

But my eye is undoubtedly more influenced by cinema than by painting, to tell the truth. I grew up with certain silences of Antonioni, the fixed shots of Kieslowski, the raking light of a film that explains nothing. I often look at things like a cameraman: the framing, the light, the off-screen are as important to me as the subject. A character sitting on a bus, a woman in an empty room, sometimes they speak louder than a loud scream.

More than imitation, what interests me is not claiming a lineage, it's finding my own voice within this realistic field. What attracts me to figuration is that it allows a direct approach, without discourse. It poses shapes, bodies, gestures, and leaves room for ambiguity. For suggestion. It's an immediate language, but one that can last a long time.

I don't have a manifesto. No program. I'm looking for a form of accuracy. Something tenuous, which resists effects. Realistic painting gives me this possibility: to slow down. To approach. To capture.

I've often been told about melancholy, in relation to my work. It's a word that suits me, as long as it's understood as listening—not as complaining. I paint characters who allow themselves an absence. Who aren't there to seduce you. They are elsewhere, in their own world. It's up to you to join them—or not.

I like it when you can get lost in a painting. When you don't understand everything. When you don't necessarily find what you came looking for. That's what I expect from art, too.

This site brings together years of work, fragments of this quest. Not a retrospective. More of a journey. Portraits, scenes, lights. Silences, above all.

Thank you for entering with your eyes open.

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