Frédéric Platéus
Succinct sport-inspired reliefs balance pop culture and design.
“I like assembling my work as if they are puzzles, creating objects to put on walls that feel like sculptural paintings.”
Frédéric Platéus is a self-taught artist who aestheticises a wealth of his own interests from motorsports to space travel. His signature ‘Anabolic Panels’ are abstract reliefs that contain bulging PVC compositions. After being carefully designed, each individual panel is cut from wood, stretched, and sealed with heat onto custom-made PVC. When assembled, Platéus screen-prints onto the glossy surfaces, usually in a palette of primary colours, along with white, silver and the occasional neon. A range of influences inspire the works including street art, pop culture and minimalism. Humour and iro...
Frédéric Platéus is a self-taught artist who aestheticises a wealth of his own interests from motorsports to space travel. His signature ‘Anabolic Panels’ are abstract reliefs that contain bulging PVC compositions. After being carefully designed, each individual panel is cut from wood, stretched, and sealed with heat onto custom-made PVC. When assembled, Platéus screen-prints onto the glossy surfaces, usually in a palette of primary colours, along with white, silver and the occasional neon. A range of influences inspire the works including street art, pop culture and minimalism. Humour and irony run throughout all of the works. MK5-160 (2019) for instance is based on a gun. While its inspiration is an archetype of masculine violence, Platéus sabotages its viciousness by making it abstract - more cartoon zombie gun than real weapon. In doing so, he undermines the very archetypes he draws from.
Platéus draws inspiration from now retro sci-fis like Barbarella, Star Trek and Tank Girl. This sense of nostalgic futurism emanates throughout his practice. Extravagant Traveler is a portable plane-like sculpture that takes its name from a song by eccentric rapper Kool Keith. Resting on a trailer instead of a plinth, it takes mundane trips around the local area whenever it is exhibited. Blundering its way through the grand architecture of international museums and galleries, the work is intentionally clumsy and obsolescent — playfully embodying a vintage idea of ‘the future’ that has swiftly become a thing of the past.
Frédéric Platéus was born in 1976 in Belgium and currently lives and works in Liège.
The artist's distinctive, bulging works realise fine art archetypes - Mondrian's colour planes, Pop Art's commercial aesthetics - using unprecedented techniques and materials.
Work featured in collections including BPS22, Parliament of the French Community of Belgium and his home country's National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions.
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