Born in 1973 in Carpentras, Antoine Baer was admitted in 1994 to ENSBA Paris (1994-2000).
It is in the practice of oil painting that he finds his largest breathing space. Constrained by techniques specific to this medium, a figuration and a format, it represents landscapes which would like an invitation to take off, by offering a walk for the eye. And so for the mind. The table is then the window by which it is possible to escape.
His paintings are as much inspired by paintings of idealized landscapes painted in the 17th century by Lorraine or Nicolas Poussin for example, as of the Mediterranean landscape in which he lives.
First working on the motif, he reports in the workshop taking of painted or drawn notes which he generally pursues from memory and imagination or which will be used to make other paintings. These pieces of captured landscapes appear to him as impregnated with the Roman ancient world, still very present in our contemporary southern environment (Roman bridges, ancient theaters, aqueducts, oppidums, arcs, sarcophagi, etc.).
"This presence of the ancient in the Provençal landscape inevitably evokes me classicism. It is in the middle of this" framework "that characters, sometimes, invite themselves to animate the painting where nature plays a preponderant role otherwise the main role.
Coming from images of the news, portraits of my loved ones, fragments of masters of masters, these figures embody the human condition in what it has permanent despite all the new technologies that surround it today, despite A world in changes that affect its daily life in an unprecedented way. In their form, my figures oscillate between the concerns of scrupulously representing and that of smearing in all jubilation.
In tightrope walkers, I advance on a crest line, with the need to describe and on the other that of being in a maximum letting go. Nicolas Poussin-Joan Mitchell as two extremes in a way. "
Antoine Baer
