Born in 1976, lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Sébastien Maloberti is an artist whose work embraces a wide range of inspirations and applications. Although he is first and foremost a painter, he fluidly moves his practice through distinct technical periods. From 2015 to 2020, his work was marked above all by the use of print, often with a diaphanous appearance and playing with the threshold of the image's appearance.
Since 2021, he has been working on the ‘Playground’ series, a series of paintings in identical format that apply a support protocol: a clever mixture of earth, glue and hemp that, once dry, spreads out like a playground on which Sébastien Maloberti comes to practise and experience a return to painting. These pieces, whose painted surface can feature a variety of motifs - latticework, circles, crosses, serpentines - as well as monochrome solids or recurring lettering - SNOW - are revealed in a second reading as topographical data: witnesses to the pictorial interventions successively applied by the artist to the initial clay support until the final result. The question of overlaying is of paramount importance to the artist. It reflects a working attitude that is both precise and impulsive, while also implying a potential for renewal, like a landscape changed and united by the whiteness of the first snowfall.
Since the notion of colour is first and foremost a matter of vision, Sébastien Maloberti has been interested in the history of the evolution of our physiological capacities, with its share of theories, interpretations and fantasies that sometimes make up narratives with pre-human SF content. The image of the fruit, which emerges indolently in the artist's most recent works, stems from this : while the emergence of trichromatic vision in monkeys enables them to spot fruit more easily, it also leads them to select the most colourful, linking the fruit tree and the fruit-eating animal in their evolution.
In this way, the artist seems to be cultivating his view of the origins and evolution of human perceptions, at the same time as he is tracing, with his own tools, his formal path towards a return to colour.
reseau-dda.org/fr/artists/sebastien-maloberti