Sylvain Doreau is a multidisciplinary Franco-American artist based in Dublin, Ireland. After spending two decades in California—between San Francisco and Los Angeles—these cities have become recurring landscapes in his work: imagined, gentrified, reinterpreted, and always infused with a sense of nostalgia.

His artistic practice is deeply rooted in his experience as a technological nomad and expatriate, shaped by a career in animation and video games. Urban signs, maps, fog, atmosphere, and saturated light form the core of his visual language, expressing a desire to capture fleeting impressions and the impermanence of place. Rather than freezing a moment, his work remains open and evolving, unfolding over months or even years.

Doreau draws inspiration from the path of Richard Diebenkorn, whose West Coast work fused abstraction and landscape with a sensitive, minimalist precision. Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, his dialogue with abstract expressionism, and his quiet disregard for Pop Art resonate with Doreau’s own balancing act between structure and spontaneity. His aesthetic is also informed by Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, the French lineage of Cézanne and Bonnard, and the visual experimentation of his Bay Area peers.

The theoretical foundations of his work are influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s writings on America and the poetic materialism of Gaston Bachelard, especially Water and Dreams and Air and Dreams, these texts deepen his exploration of atmosphere, memory, movement, and the symbolic dimensions of the city.

As a phygital artist, Doreau bridges traditional and digital mediums. From drawing, painting, and photography to 3D animation, video, and artificial intelligence, his approach challenges the boundaries of format and presentation. His works are conceived as modular systems, adaptable to classical or immersive settings: print, video, installation, VR, projection mapping.

His ongoing series, Cadastre Exquis—a reference to the surrealist practice of automatic writing—maps emotional and sensory responses onto the urban grid. Through this layered cartography, he reclaims commercial and architectural signs to build a personal, symbolic alphabet. His art becomes both a poetic and critical response to gentrification, a visual act of resistance, and a re-appropriation of identity.

Blending West Coast aesthetics with European critical thought, Sylvain Doreau offers a hybrid, time-stretched vision of the city, where memory and technology converge in luminous fragments of the present. His digital videos reimagine the city as an emotional and poetic space—combining abstraction, rhythm, and original soundtracks to trace movement, memory, and change.