Heavily influenced by urban arts and design, Sémor calls for reflection on our time by offering mazes of images that show an accumulation of characters and staggered scenes.
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Sémor is a french designer, artist and muralist. Design is central to his work. His research in the studio allows him to practise and experiment with various supports and media and he has taken advantage of the outdoors to offer large format images in public spaces. His need for meetings and exchanges has led him to take part in artistic collaborations of this kind through projects both in France and abroad.
A notable one is the one he did with fellow French muralist Ador, in which they created several murals and graffiti throughout Nantes, in the North-West of France. The physical support of the wall provided a space big enough for several people to work together at the same time, which made their collaborations the perfect mix between their styles. Sémor’s distorted and labyrinthic universe, where figurative and abstract mix, can be seen in these works crossed by organic elements such as architecture, transport, nature, industry, and mechanisms.
Sémor has an accumulative style that is reminiscent of the new realism art movement - especially French artist Arman’s works- and one could even say that his paintings' compositions share a similarity with Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Accumulation allows him to separate bits of life or objects into identifiable fragments, which ultimately requires an effort on the part of the spectator. He is then able to transmit his energy and his dynamism in the service of images implanted in a unique context each time.
Influenced by the urban spectacle, he recounts situations which mix reality and fiction, through phenomena of accumulation and staggered scenes, populated by various characters and objects. Sémor offers mazes of images that are pretexts for various readings and call for reflection on our time.
Pôle Magnetic gallery is designed as a laboratory that explores the language of the Arts with urban influences and more distant inspirations, figurative or abstract, between spontaneity and the search for perfection. This transversal space invites the spectator to discover the diversity of pictorial styles and creative processes to offer an exclusive panorama of a current movement. Inaugurated in 2018, the gallery has established itself in Bordeaux as a centre for the exhibition and dissemination of contemporary aesthetics.
Cover image: Sémor, Traffic Jam, 2022. Courtesy of Galerie Pôle Magnetic
Written by: Zara Colombo
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