The Seydoux STYLE

Pierre Wat

Few people know, and most likely few people knew during his life-time, that before becoming the silkscreen printer we know him as today, Éric Seydoux had experimented with several mediums with the intention of developing a personal artistic practice. This initial aspiration, soon buried underneath another one that would fill his life and become his profession, already says something about what we might call the Seydoux style, both through the way it was expressed and through Eric’s own discretion on the subject.

First and foremost, those who knew him all remember his discretion and his way of maintaining a timid reserve. He was a man of few words who preferred working to talking, and who would never put himself in the limelight. As the few texts he left behind make clear, he saw himself as a fellow: one who stands next to the artists, making their work possible without signing the finished product.

In the few early works found by his daughter Amélie, however, some-thing else draws our attention. These lithographs and woodcuts date from the middle of the 1960’s when Seydoux was about twenty years old. While contemplating them to look for the young man who made them and what he aspired to, we find that, against our will, we’re reduced to playing a game of similarities. Some of the lithographs evoke the lines and patterns of Van Gogh’s paintings from his time in Provence to the point of pastiche. As for the woodcuts, they seem to sum up in a few images an entire swath of the history of the medium and the styles which favored its development, most notably German expressionism, of which Seydoux’s xylographic experiments are par-ticularly reminiscent. We can see, though, that when color appears, initially as a splotch in a lithograph from 1966 before becoming the central theme of the work in two lithographed abstract compositions done the following year, something else more original emerges that reveals a genuine pleasure in giving free rein to the interplay of colors and their textures, their harmonies and their contrasts.

This could be seen as nothing more than the typical work of a young person, still influenced by his unassimilated admiration for artists and