Elsewhere

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce Elsewhere, an exhibition of recent work by French artist Stéphane Villafane.

Elsewhere brings together a suite of paintings shaped by intimacy and the lingering trace of experience. His canvases do not describe landscapes or journeys—instead, they emerge from what endures after the fact. Within their quiet restlessness they carry the afterimage of movement. In the artist’s words: “the scent of the landscapes traversed.”

Villafane’s process is anchored in a delicate balance of creating and undoing. Inspired by his background in architecture and his travel journals, each canvas begins as a chronicle of his steps before evolving away and beyond them—becoming elsewhere. Echoing Cézanne, Villafane deems a painting complete only once it vibrates and breathes from all sides, when presence asserts itself through absence. He resists any form that seems overly fixed or declarative, choosing instead to veil, fracture, or disrupt it: “It is impossible to paint a form that is too obvious, too conspicuous, without then undoing it… A form without imperfection is a form without life.” What remains is the expression of what a form might have been, or could still become. In this approach, imperfection and deviation are living elements: the echo of a painting in continuous becoming.

Across these compositions, shifts, ruptures, and elusive lines expand the pictorial field rather than define it. Some of the most captivating moments on the canvas are where opacity meets translucence: in 14.02.2024, broad sweeps of white and pale grey cut horizontally across the surface like a band of mist moving through darker strata, only to be interrupted by visually textured passages. Branches of white cut across the black, gray is scraped down by a decisive stroke. By following his hand one can also follow a sense of motion interrupted. The paint feels pushed, erased, and reasserted. Where forms nearly emerge before dissolving, instability becomes a generative force.

Elsewhere proposes painting as a living, unsettled terrain—one that demands an acceptance of instability and ongoing transformation. The brushstrokes feel newly laid, the unseen harmonies between shapes and colors still finding their accord. Once all is resolved, everything still remains in motion. Only when we stand before them are we drawn into their unfolding; it is our gaze that settles the restless seam across the seamless space.

Born in France, in 1969, Stéphane Villafane earned his graduate degree from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Lyon, France, and the École Technique Supérieure d'Architecture in Barcelona, Spain while also specializing in the visual arts. He has exhibited in Europe and the United Kingdom. This is his second solo exhibition at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.