Emmanuel Régent lives and works in Villefranche-sur-Mer and Paris. After graduating from Paris' École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in 2001, he is awarded with the 2009 Prix Découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo. In 2014, he is resident artist on-board the Tara / Agnès b schooner on a journey that takes him from the Cyclades to Lebanon. In 2015, he wins the public commission for the Camp de Rivesaltes' Memorial, a historical site with a monument designed by Rudy Ricciotti.
His work is regularly exhibited in galleries and institutions both in France and abroad and his pieces are part of private and institutional collections: Voorlinden Museum (Holland), Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain (Nice), Fonds Municipal d'Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, Ettore Fico Museum (Turin, Italy), Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (Marseille), Ville de Vitry-sur-Seine (repository at the MAC/VAL), Fondazione Rivoli2 (Milan, Italy)…
For the past ten years, using black ink on white paper, Emmanuel Régent has drawn people queuing, seaside rocks and, more recently, archaeological vestiges and modern cities in ruins.
His last series: "Pendant qu'il fait encore jour" (While there is still daylight) refers to pictorial romanticism and to the guilt stemming from disaster images. Emmanuel Régent’s voluntarily patchy drawings suggest the melancholia of vanitas and the horrid fascination we feel in front of the dramas unfolding on our screens. The immediacy opposes the eulogy of deliberateness used in his drawings.
This "potential tilting" fascinates the artist, this relationship to the "uncertainty and fragility of the perceptible" with a special focus on all things representing disappearance, loss or absence. “I try to build evasions, to organise an escape, to open up exits through the whiteness of the paper, to build spaces of suppositions, divagation, bewilderments…”