Biography

I am a gay artist, a cisgender artist too. C’est le prisme de tout, c’est ce qui infuse mon travail plastique

comme mes engagements activistes. It is a way of repairing.

Throughout Samuel Perche’s discourse and work, the need to repair can be felt. The need for care, the need to repair individual and collective wounds, fantasy worlds and perceptions traumatised in the present and the past. This, Samuel Perche contemplates with much optimism, even though all of this may well explode tomorrow. Such a sense of emergency permeates all his work.

Samuel Perche’s artistic path belongs both to his personal and collective life story ; it is open and oscillates between intimate narratives and community struggles, whether feminist, queer or LGBTQIA+.

First videographer, he was for ten years an actor on stage and television in Paris, before going to La Reunion, a French overseas department where he settled down in 2013 and obtained a diploma from the National School of Arts. This is when the first exhibitions of his work as painter and sculptor were set up.

At the same time, he helped organize La Réunion's first LGBTQIA+ Visibility March and the creation of the Indian Ocean LGBTQIA+ Center, while also working as a cultural player in the island's artistic sector.*

Today, in Brittany where he was born, and where he came back and settled down in 2024, Samuel Perche does plastic research about contemporary masculinities and about liberation of speech.

« How can the gay body be the emblem of a struggle at a time when sexual and gender identities call the fundaments of a heteronormative society into question, and challenge the locus of power of a dominating white masculinity? » Samuel Perche asks. « révéler l’intimité d’un désir individuel et communautaire » s’érige comme un nouveau paradigme dans son œuvre, pour questionner les parts silenciées et invisibilisées d’une identité pédée en mouvement.

“How can the gay body be an emblem of struggle in an age when sexual and gender identities question the foundations of heteronormed society, and refute the powers of a dominant white masculinity?” questionne-t-il.

Through his pictorial research presenting an esthetics that is as poetical as it is political, the artist thus explores the notion of desire, of bodies, and of homoeroticism to question their representations.

* Samuel Perche organized his first personal exhibition of monumental sculptures @ Corpus in the TEAT Champ Fleuri Gallery. From 2019 to 2021, he got a job as artistic director and communication manager at the envol, which is the first development agency for artists authors and dedicated structures; he was also in charge of the Reunion Talents Fund. In 2022 , he became a coordinator of actions in favour of LGBTQIA+ persons in La Reunion within the LGBTQIA centre of which he is a founding member. As a curator, he set up Terra Incognita 1 and 2, as well as « Au Loin s’en viennent » at the Pavillon Martin of the Regional Contemporary Art Fund in La Reunion. 2022 NO-MAN-MEN was Samuel Perche’s first personal painting exhibition.