Steeve Grangier

Lives and works in Switzerland

Artist statement

I have painted for over forty years, mostly self-taught, working outside any academic structure. My practice centers on the human figure - not as anatomy to be faithfully recorded, but as matter to be pushed toward transfiguration. I build my paintings with a palette knife rather than a brush, layering pigment until the surface carries physical weight as much as image. I am not interested in likeness for its own sake: what matters to me is the moment a face or a body stops resembling a person and starts carrying something closer to raw presence - instability, mutation, an identity caught mid-transformation rather than fixed in place. This has taken several directions within my work. In one body of work, human and animal forms merge into hybrid figures, testing the boundary between civilized identity and instinct. In another, Noctis Corpus, I build on wood panel and incorporate actual grapevine roots into the paint - real organic matter standing in for the parts of a body that resist description, closer to assemblage than to traditional painting. In Les Musiciens, a more recent series of portraits, six historical composers share a single underlying palette while each face is worked according to that individual's own psychological register - an attempt to hold both a common ground and a distinct interior life in the same series. After decades of largely private practice, I took early retirement at the end of 2025 and have since returned to painting with renewed intensity,...

Artwork