Made in Italy

Christophe was introduced to drawing and painting at an early age by his two grandmothers, both artists. They guided him in his choice of colors and in the proportions of his drawings. He often accompanied them to museums and galleries in Paris where he discovered some of the great painters of the time, including Francis Bacon, who was to leave his mark on his work. Cinema, comics and advertising were also part of his daily life due to his parents' professional activities.
At the age of 21, he was employed by the Banque de l'Image in Paris as a salesman. Passionate about cinema, he quickly became responsible for the cinema sector of this company where he worked for about ten years. He also discovered the wonderful art reproductions of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. This is also how he discovered American art with Edward Hopper and later Warhol and Lichtenstein. His need to express himself became a real obsession. Every evening when he came home from work, he tried his hand at all forms of pictorial expression, borrowing from each of his masters. Encouraged by his family and friends, he launched his first exhibition in Gordes in the Vaucluse.
Since 1993 he has devoted himself exclusively to painting and lives and works in the Luberon.
He has exhibited in Chantilly, Gordes, Avignon ... He is present in several beautiful galleries in Paris, in province and in Switzerland.
"His painting combines two aesthetic approaches that one might suppose irreconcilable. One, conceptual, appropriates some of the codes of advertising or fashion photography, geometric figures, sidereal emptiness, cold colors; the other, expressive, organic, proceeds from a current of which Francis Bacon, among others, constitutes an achievement.
On the canvas, the confrontation between these two antagonistic approaches is generally violent, sometimes learned and appeased, always random. Masked by a mineral framework, a cold net, imposes itself the presence of a corrupting disorder, of a mutant, proliferating suffering. This second plan perverts the first one, dissolving it like an acid, is a human form, I am certain that it is a human form...
But we will not get away with it. In the space of the canvas, there is neither winner nor loser, the confrontation does not cease, and the painter does not drop the mask. Then, what is it about? The question, said the poet, closes on itself like the hand on the white weapon. What the painting of Christophe STREICHENBERGER gives to see, let us look at it in face.