Monsieur Térez is a self-taught visual artist based in Pau. Trained in art history and archaeology, he has been developing a singular visual language for more than twenty years, nourished by early-childhood drawings, collective memory, popular tales and spontaneous forms.
Through drawing, sculpture, installation, light-based works and interventions in public space, he has built an instantly recognisable universe, populated by hybrid characters, imaginary animals and figures that seem to have stepped out of a forgotten tale. His work is in dialogue with folk art, art brut, the CoBrA movement and the imaginary worlds of childhood — not as aesthetic references, but as manifestations of a universal graphic language.
Self-taught, Monsieur Térez stands for a practice that is free, intuitive and deeply accessible. He does not seek to impose a reading of his works, but to create the conditions for an encounter. The viewer is invited to continue the story, to invent their own narratives and to compose their own imaginary world. Each work thus becomes an open space of interpretation, where humour, absurdity and poetry question our relationship to the world.
Over the years he has carried out numerous public commissions, developed monumental installations and collaborated with cultural institutions and local authorities, while regularly taking to the urban space with participatory interventions that invite residents to look at their everyday surroundings with fresh eyes.
Today Monsieur Térez opens a new chapter of his research with Humanimality, a project that brings together every dimension of his work. Through La Fabulisterie he imagines a world where language becomes raw material for creation, where characters invent their own dialogues and where the public is invited to take an active part in the making of the work.
More than an exhibition, Humanimality proposes a collective experience of creation. By bringing together an artist residency, interventions in public space, participatory workshops and an exhibition, Monsieur Térez pursues one and the same ambition: to recover that first gaze on the world — the gaze of childhood, where everything remains possible and every story is still to be invented.
