It’s a great pleasure to feature an exclusive interview with Jean-Michel Bihorel, the 1st Place Winner at the International Competition, a collaboration of the Florence Biennale, Art Market Magazine, and Lens Magazine.
Jean-Michel Bihorel (born in France in 1988) is a digital artist. He has been doing digitally generated pictures since 2008 after finishing his studies at an animation school in France.
At the beginning of his artistic journey, he worked for movies and commercials, doing special effects and fully 3D animated visuals. This led him to work for famous brands and feature films. The demanding production environment allowed him to sharpen his taste for detailed and photorealistic images. Jean-Michel indeed initiated his own artistic approach back in 2016. This is the period he took to master the technical aspects of the digital medium and the maturation necessary for the emergence of subjects that touched him. Child of two artists using traditional supports, he has permanently been attached to the beauty of the material, the gesture, and, more generally, to a certain figurative realism in art.
As a child of the digital generation, he fully embraces this medium with infinite potential, which offers complete freedom of expression.
Bihorel always ensures that the digital side of his artworks differs from what characterizes them in the first place. Building a 3D picture requires much technical knowledge and can quickly look dull. So many steps are involved in creating the final picture’s workflow, and the artist must have a clear view of his goals. Also, where most traditional artists try to get perfect control over reality, a digital artist fights against the digital perfection of 3D imagery, always adding some imperfections to get nearer to what makes a subject real and profound. His artistic approach leads him to anchor his images in visual realism.
Jean-Michel aspires to link the contemporary medium and the traditional know-how he was brought up with.
