Samuel Bas

In the whimsical yet unsettling universe of Samuel Bas, miniature figures teem with life, their vibrant hues belying the shadowy undercurrents of their worlds. The French illustrator, celebrated for his meticulous, toy-like tableaus, crafts scenes that oscillate between childlike wonder and adult unease—a duality that has cemented his reputation as a storyteller of the subconscious.

Born from a blend of nostalgia and disquiet, Bas’s work is rooted in his own youth. After training at Paris’s EPSAA (École Professionnelle Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques), he took a job illustrating coloring books—a role that left him creatively stifled. “I became a ghost,” he recalls, describing the anonymity of commercial work. “A drawing machine with the company’s name on my forehead.” The experience proved pivotal: he abandoned the role, vowing never to relinquish authorship again.

Childhood, for Bas, is less a aesthetic than a psychological lens. His characters—wide-eyed, often melancholic—inhabit realms where festivity collides with the grotesque. “My images aren’t *for* children,” he clarifies, “but a bridge between adult anxieties and childhood fantasies.” This tension electrifies pieces like *Festin*, an ongoing project depicting spectral boys assembling a mythical banquet. Here, Baroque opulence meets visceral violence, a visual ode to mythology and esoterica. “It’s the culmination of years of aesthetic exploration,” he notes.

Bas’s influences are as eclectic as his imagination: 1930s cartoons (*Betty Boop*, *Flip the Frog*) with their “crazy, disturbing” vitality; the grotesquerie of François Desprez’s monsters; even the sweat-drenched knights of his own future projects. Toys—Playmobil, plastic horses—are recurring muses, their simplicity a canvas for complexity. “They’re fragments of memory,” he says, “reanimated to tell new stories.”

Collaboration, too, shapes his practice. *Ruines* (2021), co-created with Joachim Galerne, merges past and present in a crumbling cityscape, using traditional animation techniques to blur temporal lines. “We painted spaces on paper and characters on rhodoïd,” Bas explains, “to build a bridge between eras.”

Looking ahead, Bas’s ambitions are as whimsical as his art: an animated short about tunnels “shaped by what emerges from them”; books exploring an apple’s interior or a knight’s perspiration. Yet beneath the levity lies a deeper quest—to interrogate memory, identity, and the eerie beauty of the mundane.

In Samuel Bas’s hands, the miniature becomes monumental—a world where every tiny figure pulses with the weight of human experience. As he mines the past to decode the present, his work invites us to peer closer, challenging us to find the darkness in the delightful, and the delight in the dark.