Stéphane Zaech
Stéphane Zaech in his studio in Montreux, Switzerland
Statement of Work
I paint what I love, and I paint until I love what I’ve painted. One can love a flower, a face, a doorknob, a stone or a mountain, anything.
A changing mixture of what I see, what I feel and what I know. The light.
When a painting turns out to be good, I try to make another one, just the same, maybe to get a bunch of good paintings and be happy. But it usually doesn’t work. For some reason I can’t go through the same breach twice.
So I have to take my brush again, start again, fail again, go into the unknown again, and hopefully discover something that will set me free.
Maybe the only thing that doesn’t change is the process; it’s always work in progress. What you cannot change is called style. Style is what can bring you to the closest to yourself. It’s the style that may give a painting some interest, nothing else.
The process is visible. What you see in a painting is the result. But in fact, what you really see is the process that led to the result. There was nothing, and then there is something.
SZ, April 2020
Stéphane Zaech is a Swiss artist, born 1966 in Vevey, Switzerland, who lives and works in Montreux and Villeneuve. His challenging and provocative works encapsulate multiple perspectives of time and art history. They exist both as compositions of seemingly dissonant pieces and as dialogues with audiences both past and present, a multi-lingual and uniquely cosmopolitan Babel of voices and images.
Zaech’s painterly technique and perspective give the viewer multiple ways to experience his works. Leaving the imagination to piece together the deconstruction of the pictorial worlds created by oil on canvas. The landscapes transport us through time and art history, a mirror that carries the eye back to the wall for a conversation in the artists own language that is not one sided: both how you see them and how the figures in his portraits see the world. He uses his brush to portray contradictory visions for a spectator accustomed to a certain ideal of beauty. To express what he has loved. This personal language is primarily fed by his visual memory, but doesn’t fail to reflect a sense of humor.
Stephane Zaech's works can be found in the collections of major Swiss banks and museums, as well as private collections in Geneva and Zurich.
