FIGITAL WANDERER

BIO

Sylvain Doreau (born in 1964 in Paris) is a “Figital” artist, digital and painting. Digital itinerant in animation and video games. He pursues an artistic career in parallel, developing works inspired by the memory of Californian urban landscapes, and the impermanence that has punctuated his life for several decades. He is a pioneer of digital animation who for 30 years has worked for the biggest game and animation studios, and spent 20 years in California. Through contracts, layoffs, burnout, moves, and opportunities chosen or not, he lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles which greatly influenced his work. He now lives in Dublin, Ireland.

He grew up in the Paris region, initially influenced by his grandfather, an artistic ironworker, with whom he developed a taste for drawing, pattern, and volume. From forging to 3D modeling tools, he first studied visual arts, where he met the artists of the Moment Synthèse group, pioneers of "new" digital images. After choosing an audiovisual production school (ESRA Paris), he began his career as a 3D computer graphics artist, working in leading Parisian studios that were starting to take an interest in animation and digital images. Between 1989 and 1996, he was one of the founders of a pioneering digital animation and virtual reality studio, which became Medialab Paris, the technological and artistic laboratory and creative incubator of Canal+ during the group's "golden" era. Driven by a creative impulse, a flourishing and innovative technology, he designs numerous television graphics, music videos & commercials. He also started to collaborate and translated into 3D animation the visual universe of artists such as the Di Rosa brothers, Kriki, Matt Mulligan. He also carried out projects for Francis Ford Coppola & Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Gabriel, and the comic legend Moebius.

At less than 30 years old, he was already a leading figure in European digital animation. But frustrated by the lack of dynamism and optimism in Paris, and eager for new horizons, he made a radical departure. He joined DreamWorks Animation in San Francisco in 1997, working on "Antz" and "Shrek," where he became a layout artist and set designer for these first digitally animated films.

Eager to return to painting and a personal oeuvre, he restarted his artistic practice, mainly influenced by the city, and initially by gestural surrealist painting, before moving towards a more abstract practice, notably influenced by the "West Coast Experiment" with painters such as Richard Diebenkorn, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. He exhibited in group shows in the Bay Area and Phoenix, Arizona. As a trained director & cinematographer, he also began using video and photography as one of the leading media of his work, along with painting. After Shrek, and a burnout in 2001, he left animation and returned to Paris for a summer residency, where he refocused on painting. An opportunity soon brought him back to San Francisco, where he turned to video games, working at Electronic Arts. He settled into a downtown San Francisco loft, which he transformed into a studio and private exhibition space (the 6th street loft). There, he created abstract and kinetic works inspired by San Francisco's nightlife and began documenting the city center's gentrification on video.

In 2003, after the dot-com bubble exploded, the art market collapsed, and he moved to the North Beach neighborhood, where he developed a more intimate body of work inspired by urban mapping. He explores themes of memory, impermanence, and emotions in his "Exquisite Cadastres," inspired by the city and Golden Gate Park and the daily rhythms of the fog that inexorably invades the town every evening.

In 2010, he joined Lucasfilm to work on Star Wars projects, collaborating directly with George Lucas at the famous Skywalker Ranch, concluding a long apprenticeship cycle. After new layoffs punctuating the life of the American studios, he left Sausalito, where he had made his home, to seek new opportunities in Los Angeles. He collaborated with the gaming giant Activision, for whom he directed cinematics for the biggest game franchises.

New influences enriched his artistic activity: the bright light of Southern California's beach towns, the immense urban fabric scattered across dozens of satellite cities, hemmed in by an inextricable network of constantly crowded, oppressive, and endless freeways. Numerous local museums, modern art foundations, and a more informal and organic art and gallery world contributed to revitalizing his work, which took a more "pop" turn. He also started to create music under the “Spacecargo” name creating an instrumental post rock album and multiple Art videos

Following yet another layoff, he decided in 2018 to end the American dream, bringing things full circle. He returned to Europe, settled in Ireland, and settled in Dublin, while continuing his career in gaming and video animation, traveling extensively, from London to India.

The artist's latest works focus on breaking the codes of conventional formats and media, moving towards a hybrid art form, combining traditional media, paper, and canvas with digital formats. He expands the work, offering an alternative to the standards of exhibition and collection formats (small or large format, canvas or paper, video, NFT). The work becomes modular, can be adapted, and thus "extended" across multiple media, offering collectors and exhibition spaces numerous alternatives.