"Grand son of the clown John Scott, who traveled throughout Europe with the Australian Circus in the early part of the 20th century, Hervé Scott Flament was born in Paris on February 1st 1959. His father was an acrobat who committed suicide when Flament was very young. His mother raised him alone and inculcated him with her tastes for the supernatural, fantasy and the 'fantastique' culture born a century before, inherited from the Romantism era.
"Flament began studies in the natural sciences intending to become either a paleontologist or a zoologist, but he changed paths in 1977 when the punk movement unfurled in the western world. He started playing guitar a few months before and dedicated the next ten years of his life to music. He played with several french punk bands and set up the group Ici Paris who recorded one LP and four singles. New interests carried him into uncharted directions and he began to paint. He immediately sold his first paintings which inspired him to devote more of his time towards his new endeavour. Flament taught himself to paint and brought back an ancient painting technique that no present art school could have taught him.
"What is fantastique?
"Official art has always relegated the 'fantastique' to a minor genre and allowed it to be extant only in cartoons and commercial movie pictures, in fact so hidden are the literary gothic and post-romantic masterpieces which were its cradle. So what is 'fantastique' anyway? First it is a feeling as ancient as humanity itself, a combination of fear and wonder face to face with the Unknown. It was born at the dawn of civilization and practised in meticulous religious and magic rituals, antic theatrical performances where each actor played the part of the god to capture his mighty strength and directed it to his own blessing and to that of his community. Divination, this intuition fed from the imagination and its first incarnations came in the shape of tales and legendary sagas. From primitive oral tradition and popular folklore, the fantastique soon bloomed into poetry, then later it became a reference point for a new art form: the Gothic style writing. From Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Gregory Lewis succeeded Mary Shelley, Erckmann-Chatrian, Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire and the decadent european school. If the 19th century gave birth to the 'fantastique', the 20th century propelled the genre into an unending arborescence, from pure terror and heroic fantasy, closer to poetry, to the political and social philosophy we today call science-fiction. Literature allowed the Fantastique genre to assert itself but Fine Art seems to have barred it except for symbolism and english Pre-Raphaelite painters, then surrealism drew it to a close, intellectualising it and submissing it to the laws of Sigmund Freud. However, Fantastique Art, this sacred perversion of the old Romantism is the major art of the 20th and of the 21th century to come because it kept an anchor deep within feelings and sensations which has always been the driving force of talent. As our planet is shrinking day by day, as artists are sinking into their dogmas and into this propaganda that became the history of Art, new frontiers are opening to us: the conquest of space and of our own interior world. The time has come for explorers and adventurers of Thought, a Kingdom for freemen! I have opened a gate to the other world, a more sensitive realm in correlation with what the ancient Egyptians termed "intelligence of the heart". In each painting I further explore the depths of the mind, following Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton. This universe is not one-dimensional and these paintings attempt to reflect the multi-faceted nature of our cosmos. In it, is no good nor evil, or perhaps both at the same time."
