Siemon Scamell-Katz France

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Siemon Scamell-Katz is a contemporary painter living and working between La Creuse and Paris, France. Rejecting realistic painting or photography as “a false record of experiential reality”, he has thrown out everything representative and iconographic. Instead, he uses his knowledge of human vision to create works that draw their viewers in

Siemon Scamell-Katz is a contemporary painter living and working between La Creuse and Paris, France. Scamell-Katz’s practice is based on an understanding of the way humans see. In his mid-twenties, he launched a business that researched human behaviour and pioneered eye tracking, a technique which allowed him to understand how we see – and interpret what we see. Studying how eyes travel across an image, he discovered that we don’t see the whole view like a camera does. Instead, we pick out small elements of a scene, trying to identify what it is we’re looking at. During this process, each of us fills in the gaps with what we already know – memories, representations and symbols. In other words, we never actually see what is in front of us. Rejecting realistic painting or photography as “a false record of experiential reality”, he has thrown out everything representative and iconographic. Instead, he uses his knowledge of human vision to create works that draw their viewers in, allowing them to experience the fundamental feeling of the landscape and the Sublime, often in a deeply spiritual way. The final works – abstract paintings in oil and enamel on aluminium – possess a kind of magnetism; a sensation which has been compared to that of viewing a Mark Rothko. Siemon Scamell-Katz has recently shown his work with East Anglia Art Fund, Cley Contemporary, Black Barn Contemporary, Rue St Gilles, Florèal Belleville and Galerie Mercier Paris.