Philosophy
Herbert Dubois was born in 1987 in Marseille and grew up amid the layered cultures and shifting light of the Mediterranean. From an early age he moved restlessly through different regions, spending long stretches in places where borders between continents and languages seemed to dissolve. These years of continual passage fostered a heightened sensitivity to space, texture, and the quiet dialogue between people and their surroundings.
His practice explores the materiality of the canvas and the way body and environment interact with the surface, forcing it to resist and break down. Working across painting, tactile assemblage, and subtle interventions with fabric and pigment, Dubois treats each work as a physical encounter rather than a fixed image. The surface becomes a membrane that records pressure, gesture, and the traces of its own transformation.
Today Herbert Dubois divides his time between Paris and Marseille, carrying forward a life defined by movement and attentive observation. He remains drawn to sites where boundaries are fluid and where the imprint of human presence lingers—evidence of how environment and experience continuously shape and unsettle the act of making art.
Herbert Dubois conceives of painting as a living, sentient body rather than a passive surface. For him, the canvas is skin: porous, reactive, capable of absorbing experience until it reaches a point of rupture. He welcomes that rebellion of matter, allowing pigment and fabric to dictate their own trajectories.
At the core of his practice lies the red suture. Neither ornament nor simple repair, it is a deliberate scar – an assertion that memory cannot be erased. Each stitch becomes a site where opposites coexist: trauma and care, chaos and structure, the personal and the collective. Dubois believes that the wound must remain visible if art is to bear witness to the human condition.
He rejects the notion of painting as mere image, framing it instead as an event of encounter: a collision of gesture, pigment, and fiber that records the instability of identity and the precariousness of the present. Years spent moving through ports and borderlands impressed upon him the truth that nothing – self, place, or medium – is fixed.
For Dubois, art is an act of radical care – not to close or conceal, but to hold fragments together in fragile accord. His series Sutures embodies this conviction: the red seam is both a lifeline and a testament to endurance, a quiet affirmation that the world, though fractured, can still be touched, tended, and momentarily made whole.
