PHYGITAL WANDERER

ARTIST BIO

Sylvain Doreau (born in 1964 in Paris) is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores emotional memory, disappearance, and the urban landscape through painting, video, text, and digital technologies.

Trained in fine arts in the Paris region, he joined the pioneering Moment Synthèse collective in the early 1980s before studying audiovisual arts at ESRA Paris. During the first digital boom, he began a career in 3D graphics, designing for early Parisian studios.
Between 1989 and 1996, as part of Medialab Paris (Canal+), he created numerous TV graphics and collaborated with major artists and figures such as the Di Rosa brothers, Kriki, Matt Mulligan, Francis Ford Coppola, Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Gabriel, and Moebius. These formative years deepened his fascination with light, texture, and visual structure.

Seeking broader horizons, he joined DreamWorks Animation in San Francisco in 1998, working on Antz and Shrek as a 3D set designer, collaborating closely with the Art Department and pioneering early cinematic previsualization techniques.
During this period, deeply shaped by San Francisco’s nightlife and SoMa district, he revived his personal painting practice — first under surrealist and expressionist influences, then gradually shifting toward an abstraction inspired by the "West Coast Experiment" (Richard Diebenkorn, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns). He participates to group shows in the SF Bay Area and Phoenix, AZ

After Shrek and a period of burnout in 2001, he left the animation industry and transitioned into the video game world, joining Electronic Arts. From his downtown San Francisco loft-studio (the “6th street loft”), he developed an independent creative and exhibition space, producing kinetic abstract works, selling his work at regular events, and documenting the city’s accelerating gentrification through video.

After the collapse of the internet bubble, he moved to the historic neighbourhood of North Beach, It is during this time that he created Cadastres Exquis, blending painting, text, and fragments of printed urban maps. Inspired by Baudrillard (America), Diebenkorn, and surrealist practices, he invented an emotional cartography — an attempt to capture urban impermanence.

In parallel, he developed The North Lake painting series, based on an introspective video series filmed at Golden Gate Park, exploring light, silence, and liquid memory, echoing Gaston Bachelard’s reveries from Water and Dreams.

In 2010, he fulfilled a lifelong dream by joining Lucasfilm, working at Skywalker Ranch on Star Wars projects, under the guidance of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — a key milestone closing a long Northern California journey.

Following further industry layoffs, he relocated to Los Angeles and continued exploring his personal artistic work, enriching his visual vocabulary with the fragmented energy of Southern California’s sprawling metropolis. In Santa Monica first, then Redondo Beach, he started to explore more hybrid formats and added his own music composition to the videos.

Since 2018, he has lived in Dublin. Continuing his professional work in games and animation, he is also expanding his personal artistic practice toward a "Phygital" approach — balancing digital experimentation (AI, neural networks) with traditional media (painting, paper, print).
His recent series such as Deep Paints (immersive, layered paintings using AI) and Journaux-Peintures (fragmented visual diaries) extend his ongoing exploration of memory and disappearance.