Etienne Cendrier, designer and plastic artist, lives and works in Paris. For as long as he can remember, he has always drawn. He became a designer, also a colorist, which allowed him to use black and white as a colorist: to paint in black and white. Professional since 1992, he gradually specializes in "dry" techniques: graphite, charcoal, pastel , drawing techniques par excellence.

Pastels and charcoal take him from extreme figuration to the confines of abstraction through his favorite themes: skies and humans. By dint of "painting" in black and white, he was pushed to seek a synthesis between the descriptive and the abstract in faces or bodies in black and white. He draws both line and volume, draws freehand and never uses the photographic transfer dear to hyperrealist painters. Its subject is sensitive, visible reality - what catches the eye and what the hand can translate - and not "photographic reality".

Little by little, he freed himself from the model: they are not really existing people, most often his faces are invented or even reconstituted (like a kaleidoscope) from sketches, memories or of documents until they become as "material" as real faces. Having "won" his freedom from the model, he was able to present the face in a new way: like a mask, or surrounded by black, freed by white or black.

Since December 2012, Etienne Cendrier has also been practicing wax sculpture. His work is present in the collections of the British Museum and in the private collections of Whoopi Goldberg, Agnès Jaoui or Rufus among others.

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