Urban Stories: My Work Featured in Singulart’s Curated Collection
By Sebastien Montel
One of the most rewarding experiences for an artist is to see their work recognized in dialogue with others. I’m honored that one of my paintings was recently included in Urban Stories, a curated collection on Singulart.
As a French artist working in both Los Angeles and Palm Springs, I often return to the contradictions of city life. Cities are vibrant, layered, and filled with diversity, but they can also be anonymous and isolating. My work as an expressionist artist seeks to capture that duality: the energy and beauty of human interaction against the backdrop of alienation.
Why Cities Speak Through Art
Urban environments are more than architecture, they are emotional landscapes. In contemporary art, cities are often used as symbols of both resilience and tension. My Inner Cities series, for example, examines the contradictions of life in motion: millions of people sharing space, yet each carrying private worlds of thought and feeling.
Cities embody the perfect canvas for psychological art and emotional art. They reflect back to us our own contradictions, the desire for connection and the tendency toward solitude.
Mixed Media as an Urban Language
The way I use mixed media art mirrors the experience of living in cities. Layers of oil, pencil, and newspaper overlap like voices, stories, and histories coexisting in the same space. Just as walls in Los Angeles carry graffiti, posters, and paint over decades, my surfaces hold traces of what came before, reminding viewers that every figure is shaped by its environment.
Recognition in Context
Being featured in Urban Stories places my work among other artists exploring similar themes of memory, architecture, and emotional resonance. For me, it’s an affirmation that these explorations, intimacy, distance, and the paradoxes of modern life, are not only personal but universal.
Cities shape who we are, and art gives form to what cities leave within us.