Sébastien Nôtre is a French painter based in Milan. He started his artistic path in London, where he studied as a Fashion Designer at St. Martin’s School. He arrived later in Milan, when he realized his true art passion involved palette, paint brushes and colours.
"Fugue (n.): from Latin fuga, meaning 'flight'.
1. In psychology:
A temporary rupture with reality in which a person may leave their environment unexpectedly, sometimes unconsciously, often accompanied by a partial or total loss of identity.
2. Figuratively / literarily:
An act of mental or physical escape. A gesture of retreat — chosen or not — toward a protective or imagined elsewhere.
3. In music:
A compositional form based on the repetition and variation of a central theme, introduced successively across different voices.
I must have been five when I discovered the word "moustiquaire". I didn’t really know what the object was for, but I loved the word. There were no mosquitoes where I lived. But I liked the idea. When something bothered or bored me, I would say, “I’m going into my moustiquaire.” I would pin a sheet to the ceiling with a tack, and make myself a “moustiquaire.” I’d get underneath and stay there until it came loose and fell on me. It would fall. I’d start over. It was my own kind of fugue. There are many ways to fugue. A fugue can be psychological or physical, voluntary or forced. There is the voluntary fugue: a gesture of stepping back from reality, a move toward a protective space, built by and for oneself. And then there is the forced fugue — suffered, involuntary, when something within begins to slip, falter, and quietly draws us away from ourselves.
This series of paintings explores the idea of fugue in its different forms: through play, regression, idealisation, but above all through the construction of a world of one’s own. These paintings are, above all, shelters, escapes. Each painting is a proposition: a refuge, or an inner drift."
