/Visual Craftsman @Sebal
/Publisher @ Ed Turbulent
/Filmmaker and Photographer
Born Brussels 1974
1995 → 1997 Kent Institut of Arts &Design
1997 → 2000 Institut National des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS)
2002 → 2014 Fuzzy filmmaker @Spike&Jones (commercials & music video)
2012 → Today Crappy Fanzines Publisher @Ed Turbulent
2002 → Today Visual Craftsman
2017 → Today Director of Photography represented by Melting Pot Agency
Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1974 and raised by a family of Graphic Designers for 2 generations, Sébastien Alouf was nurtured by images and art since childhood.
He attended Kent Institute of Arts & Design and Belgian cinematography school INSAS for shaping in images his artwork, mostly inspired at the time by teenage boredom, a taste for disruption, and school bench drawings. Paradox already is his favorite angle to tackle subjects.
His first career took him to direct commercials, an opportunity to make a living putting his second-degree approach to all subjects at work, distancing himself from the function by filling the gap with derision.
Reproduction and analogic are strong supports of his creative mindset. He becomes a visual craftsman creating fanzines, collages, and montages, video clips, and putting up workshops with kids for inspiration.
2012 marks a turn into an authentic artistic life, dedicated to deconstructing what seems well-shaped to find its essence and often nonsense. Especially from socially constructed concepts and standards such as beauty, popularity, or success and power expressed with a typical feigned naïveté; The discipline of foolishness becomes his motto.
“Always naïve, never innocent” is a recurrent and favorite comment of his UN is the affix opening his art throughout any media expression; UNbroken, UNordinary, UNrealistic; UNlinear paradoxical pUNk art.
Since his artistic universe is continuously expanding from a hot dense state through a multimedia arborescent approach. Picture, film, paintings, sculpture, cardboard, ceramic, an outburst of forms offering as many touchpoints and distance to access the profound substance of his work. Then the coherence hits the one willing to take the journey and explore.
What may seem shattered is extremely consistent, the UNexpected paradox that builds Sebal’s vision.
[Biography from Ariane van der Veen – AVAVEEN, written on the occasion of The Discipline of Foolishness exhibition at Soon Gallery in Antwerp in September 2022]
