Stephen Felton: Bugaboo Voodoo

Curator : Garance Chabert

From June 15 to September 29, La Villa du Parc—contemporary art center is exhibiting the last part of a visual season dedicated to elemental materials, magical persistence and magnetic links.

All summer long, welcome to Bugaboo Voodoo, a mischievous and facetious exhibition by New York artist Stephen Felton.

Bugaboo Voodoo brings together some 15 new works produced in the spring at the Kunsthaus Biel (Switzerland) and murals created in situ at the Villa du Parc in Annemasse (France) by Stephen Felton (b. 1975, US). At first glance, his painting is disconcerting in its simplicity, a joyful phlegm and immediate accessibility that desacralize the artist’s gesture. Each large-format painting features a freehand drawing, with a reduced color palette and an obvious speed of execution. The exhibition draws its iconography from occult treatises on black magic and voodoo, revealing motifs and symbols such as the serpent, the moon and the pyramid.

Bugaboo Voodoo invites us to drink a magic potion in ancient cups

Bugaboo Voodoo is said like an incantation in a comics balloon

Bugaboo Voodoo articulates quick spontaneous gestures, traced out by a brush on barely prepared canvases

Bugaboo Voodoo invokes in the midst of the dry season the snake dance in the rain

Bugaboo Voodoo wants to make little children laugh from fear

Bugaboo Voodoo utilizes simple signs that everybody can appropriate

Bugaboo Voodoo is set up low enough not to overhang the audience

Bugaboo Voodoo stumbles at the gate of a haunted château unless it’s an abandoned villa

Bugaboo Voodoo combines freehand geometry and uninhibited figurative representation

Bugaboo Voodoo is offering an occult evening in the mountains by moonlight

Bugaboo Voodoo conjures up a primer on esoteric forms from pop culture

Bugaboo Voodoo maybe invites us not to overthink super-sophisticated discourse

Bugaboo Voodoo brings us a breath of fresh air and give hope !

etc., etc.

Stephen Felton (born in 1975, Buffalo, New York) lives and works in New York, he studied at the Massachusetts College of Art, before moving into the San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. His last exhibitions in Europe have taken place in Switzerland at MAMCO—Musée d’Art Moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2015) and KBCB—Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne (2024) and in France at Centre Pompidou, Metz (2016) ; Galerie Valentin, Paris (2019) and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (2020).