Sebastien Coueffic : Artist Profile.
Since graduating from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in 2017, Sébastien Coueffic has steadily established his presence within the French contemporary art scene. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout France, including the Salon des Artistes Français at the Grand Palais in Paris. He collaborates with galleries in Paris, The Hague, and now Japan. His works are held in private collections across Europe.
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Sébastien Coueffic has developed a painterly approach that captures the architecture of the everyday with a distinctly personal rhythm—balancing memory, structure, and chromatic intensity. His work distills the urban landscape into simplified planes, marked by saturated color and sharply cropped perspectives. The result is a visual language where clarity and abstraction coexist, drawing from sources as diverse as the architectural precision of Edward Hopper, the decorative flatness of the Nabis, and the chromatic boldness of David Hockney.
Technically, Coueffic’s connection to the Nabis movement is evident in his treatment of surface and color. Like Vuillard and Bonnard, he flattens space and suppresses linear perspective, creating images that prioritize pattern and chromatic balance over depth illusion. His use of bold, unmodulated color fields and his attention to the interplay between light and shadow reinforce the pictorial autonomy of the canvas—a key concern for the Nabis. Color in Coueffic’s work does not simply describe; it constructs. Each hue interacts with others to define volume, suggest temperature, and structure the visual rhythm.
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His creative process is grounded in a deep engagement with oil painting—his primary medium—which allows him to layer, blend, and build color with precision and depth. This commitment to oil as a material language gives his surfaces a tactile richness that supports his chromatic intentions. His process is also grounded in a reflection on how we see, recall, and reconstruct place. He draws from sketches, lived moments, and spatial impressions, translating them into compositions that merge observation with emotional geometry. The balance of form and color in his work suggests a state of stillness charged with latent presence—spaces once inhabited, or soon to be.
In partnership with Art San Gallery, Coueffic is expanding his visual research through a new series created on traditional Japanese shikishi boards. The shikishi, with its gold-trimmed, rigid format, offers a surface historically reserved for poetry, painting, and calligraphy. For Coueffic, it becomes a site of compression and focus—a scale that intensifies his exploration of composition, shadow, and spatial rhythm.​​
These works, including titles such as Shadows on the Roofs, Sunset Blue House, and Facade at Dawn, present compact architectural fragments rendered in vivid tonal contrasts. The absence of figures does not diminish their narrative quality; instead, human presence is implied through windows, fences, and the trace of daily light. Each painting becomes a reflection of silence and structure, where geometry meets lived atmosphere.
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Coueffic’s choice of the shikishi medium also signals a cross-cultural dialogue—his compositions resonate with the aesthetic clarity of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), particularly in their asymmetrical framing, bold contouring, and use of flat, luminous color. The influence of artists such as Hiroshige or Hasui Kawase can be sensed in his ability to depict stillness and solitude through minimal yet evocative means. Technically, the shikishi’s smooth, slightly absorbent surface invites precise brushwork and quick-drying execution, encouraging Coueffic to work with a sense of immediacy and restraint. The gold edges of the board reinforce the contained format, transforming each piece into a self-sufficient visual object—at once decorative and contemplative.​
The resulting works are meditative and direct, intimate yet architectonic. They invite viewers to encounter form not as static depiction but as a rhythmic and chromatic experience. Sébastien Coueffic’s painting is a practice of subtle transformation—where the exterior world is distilled into essence, and the architectural becomes a frame for reflection. His shikishi series opens a new chapter in this evolving language: one where material, format, and vision converge to articulate a fresh poetics of space.
