Sébastien Coueffic: Architectural Oil Paintings on Japanese Shikishi Boards
- artsan
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
At Art San Gallery, we are proud to present the work of French painter Sébastien Coueffic, whose refined sense of structure, color, and atmosphere turns the ordinary into something quietly monumental. His paintings capture rooftops, façades, and fragments of urban life—not as documentation, but as carefully constructed harmonies of light and form.
Rooted in figurative painting, Coueffic’s approach is shaped by a deep understanding of modernist color theory, structural clarity, and art historical influences. His visual language draws from the decorative flatness of the Nabis, the compositional restraint of Precisionism, and the warm spatial abstraction of California modern painters. At the same time, his work resists categorization. It speaks softly, yet with unmistakable presence.
In 2025, Coueffic began a new chapter of his artistic journey with Art San Gallery, creating a series of original oil paintings on Japanese shikishi boards. The series, titled Architecture, focuses on small-format studies of urban buildings, framed by strong light, clean contours, and vivid yet restrained color. These works celebrate both material tradition and contemporary sensibility. The shikishi, a gold-edged, rigid board typically used in Japanese calligraphy and painting, offers Coueffic a new format for compositional compression and visual intensity.
Each piece in this series—such as The Midday Sun, Facade at Dawn, and Shadows on the Roofs—invites us to reencounter the built world not as background, but as subject. Light cuts across walls like brushstrokes; shadow becomes an architectural gesture. There are no figures, yet the paintings feel inhabited—charged with memory, warmth, and balance.
Coueffic’s shikishi series bridges European painting traditions and Japanese formats, reflecting Art San Gallery’s mission to foster dialogue across practices and cultures. His work is intimate yet formally precise, humble in subject yet powerful in execution.
We invite you to explore Sébastien Coueffic’s Architecture series and discover how a painter’s gaze can turn rooftops and windows into rhythmic poetry.
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