After his studies at the Beaux Arts of Paris, Patrice Balvay practises painting by using the analogy between the surface of the skin and that of the canvas. The painting becomes a succession of layers and suggests to us the thickness of the flesh or its evanescence as in the series les médusés.

Stone cutting which Patrice Balvay used to practise in his younger days, marks his current approach of drawing. Indeed, the impact of the crayon on the support is the prime feature and the sheet is regarded as a block on which each stroke is irreversible. In his series pierre noire et craie blanche an only line is spinning large drifting spaces. He carries on with the performative practice of drawing in his series drawing by walking stemmed from a residence in Japan (TWS/TOKAS Residency). For each drawing Patrice Balvay starts from a preconceived gesture which he repeats, declines, breaks as a dancer or a gardener might do. The whole body, from toes to fingers, transmits its shivering, its breathing, and its falling to the crayon. It no longer is the hand that guides the stroke but rather the hand that follows the line. This non-mastery which he seeks is for Patrice Balvay the necessary condition for the line to be similar to an experiment and to become alive, so to speak.

Patrice Balvay is currently hosted in residence in Le Havre at the Fort!, a space of multidisciplinary creation. The characteristics of this town inspire his practice: the incessant variations of lights, the floating spaces of the docks, the bygone city which haunts the reconstructed town. A town, with its yawning gaps, its alignments, its height differences, its huge harbour expanses, that one can stride across as a landscape.