About

« If you take one minute to stop and look around, you will find out that talent is everywhere. Art is all about the way you look at it. Your eyes create the piece. »

Léonce Bontemps was born in Toulouse, south of France, in 1989. The self-taught painter digs into his very own memories and emotions to build a naive yet deep colorful world.

In the past years, Léonce Bontemps created several collections using dry and oil pastel.
Childhoods explores the painters « first times »: first time he felt jealousy, first time he felt pain, first time he felt excitement or boredom. In this series, Bontemps immerses himself into his very intimate world to look for raw emotions. He explores, in plural, the vulnerabilities and strengths that go along with the construction process of one’s identity.

On the other hand, Stupeurs addresses a much more trivial topic while focusing on mouths and hands deformity. Behind the inconsequential theme lays a deeper reflection on the painter’s anxieties. Indeed, talking big and nail-biting are daily manifestations of stress for the artist. That being so, Bontemps decided to mock that stress, almost turning it into a game. In this collection, panic expressions stretch to such an extent that they become the main characters of the pieces.

In his recent work, Bontemps is showing a balanced mastery of the colors and the lines while conceding the greatest attention to texture.