100 studios, 100 artists, The French scene
Connaissance des Arts x Antoine Schneck

Connaissance des Arts and photographer Antoine Schneck are unveiling a preview of around thirty photos from the series ‘100 ateliers, 100 artistes, La scène française’ (100 studios, 100 artists: the French scene) at FAB Paris.

Produced between 2015 and 2022, this project uses multiple portraits of artists in their studios to highlight the importance of these places in their lives.

A book featuring texts on the place of artists in the history of contemporary art, edited by Guy Boyer, will be published by Editions courtes et longues to coincide with FAB Paris.

The principle of the multiple portrait is to see the same artist several times in a single space.

In general, the artist appears three to six times in an image, with the space dictating the number of characters.

And Antoine Schneck’s cast is impressive: among the 100 artists who took part in the project, some have sadly passed away since their portraits were taken, including Pierre Soulages, Vera Molnar, Geneviève Claisse, Etel Adnan, Ben, Louis Cane and Marinette Cueco. Young artists such as Giulia Andreani, Edi Dubien, Thomas Lévy-Lasne and Ymane Chabi-Gara also feature.

These 100 locations are very different, ranging from a castle in the Allier region for Claire Basler to a garage in the Paris suburbs for Gilgian Gelzer.

Many of the studios are in Paris, particularly in the eastern arrondissements and the inner suburbs, from Saint-Ouen to Malakoff.

Some are cramped spaces, such as Christian Jaccard’s, or parts of apartments, while others are very large, such as Fabrice Hyber’s, which are former factories or warehouses.

All these interiors contain thousands of objects and details that ‘make’ an artist’s studio: easels, paintbrushes, brushes, cardboard boxes, paint marks on the floor, accumulations of objects of all kinds…

“My project is to organise a unique encounter between artists from the French scene and their audience.

We know artists through their works. We wanted to show the behind-the-scenes, these intimate and secret places where their inspiration, talent and patience give birth to the works that the public admires.”

Antoine Schneck

Antoine Schneck: the art of portraiture, the art of others

We were familiar with Antoine Schneck’s disturbing portraits, large-format images taken with a view camera, as in the early days of photography, on five continents.

Faces of men and women, isolated against a black background, offer a powerful face-to-face encounter with individuals from cultures sometimes very different from our own.

Here, he gives us a unique vision of the artist in his studio, another way of discovering his work.

100 ateliers, 100 artistes, La scène française 
Connaissance des Arts X Antoine Schneck