Before painting, I look. For a long time. Architecture taught me this.
Alain Rouschmeyer
EN
A Gaze Shaped by Architecture
Architecture taught me to look before acting.
To understand a space before transforming it.
To observe lines, volumes, solids and voids.
To understand how a body takes place within a setting,
how it stands there,
how it inhabits it.
This way of seeing, acquired through drawing and architectural analysis,
has never left my work.
It comes before painting.
It is its silent condition.
Each painting is born from this sustained attention to space,
to human posture,
to the fragile balance between the body
and what surrounds it.
As a contemporary figurative painter, Alain Rouschmeyer develops a body of work shaped by an architectural background, in which looking, drawing, and observing the human body in space precede painting.
Sketching as a Foundational Act
The sketch is allied with a way of seeing, with observation.
It is a moment of presence.
To draw is to remain.
To remain before a place, a posture, a light,
until something begins to settle.
The line searches.
It hesitates, corrects itself, sometimes disappears.
It is not a pursuit of form,
but a way of understanding what holds.
In the sketch, nothing is yet decided.
And that is precisely where everything begins.
The painting will come later,
when the gaze has found its accuracy.
Observational sketching holds a central place in the practice of Alain Rouschmeyer, a contemporary figurative painter, as a time for understanding the human body and space before painting.
From Drawing to Figurative Painting
Drawing never disappears.
It transforms.
When painting begins,
the gaze is already there.
The body has found its place,
space has set its lines of force.
Color does not intervene to seduce,
but to lay down a presence.
It extends the drawing,
it slows its time.
Figurative painting then becomes
a space of restraint.
A place where the body,
architecture, and landscape
continue to dialogue,
without ever imposing themselves on one another.
The figurative painting of Alain Rouschmeyer extends observational drawing through a slow, contemporary approach to the body in space, rooted in an architectural training.
A Contemporary, Slow, and Embodied Practice
My painting unfolds within a deliberately slow time.
Against the current of immediacy,
it claims attention,
presence,
restraint.
The human body appears without effect,
without imposed narrative.
It is simply there,
within a space that contains it
as much as it reveals it.
Architecture, drawing, and painting
are not separate disciplines,
but successive states of the same gaze.
What matters to me is not to tell a story,
but to allow that fragile moment to appear
in which a body finds its place.
Gold Medal 2025 – International Art Professionals Awards
Link to award page
Gold Medal – 2025 International Prize of Art Professionals
“Space is treated with the same intensity as the human figure.
More than a simple setting, it becomes an emotional landscape.”
— Andréas Alberti, art critic
This body of work belongs to an artistic path developed over time, informed by training, architecture, and painting.
His works are included in private collections in France, Switzerland, and across several European countries.
Today
Today, I continue this work of looking
through figurative painting.
I observe bodies in their simplest postures,
the spaces that receive them,
the ordinary moments in which something settles.
Each painting is an attempt at restraint.
A way of remaining.
The paintings presented here belong to this continuity
Professional visual artist.
Member of ADAGP
Member of the Fondation Taylor
Works held in private collections in France and internationally.
Practice situated within the contemporary art market.