French expressionist artist Sébastien Montel is finding new space—both physically and emotionally—to expand his evocative body of work. After years of working exclusively out of Los Angeles, Montel now splits his time between LA and Palm Springs, where the quiet tension of his emotionally charged paintings has found a compelling new home.
Montel’s work is deeply personal. His figurative paintings—often faceless, blurred, or fragmented—don’t aim to depict the world as it looks, but as it feels.
“I don’t paint from observation,” he says. “I paint from what I feel, and often from what’s difficult to name.”
Working in oil, pencil, and collaged newspaper, Montel layers textures and emotions with a touch that’s both vulnerable and unsettling. His canvases don’t offer easy answers; instead, they hold space for ambiguity, contradiction, and the invisible weight of emotional memory.
Now living part-time in Palm Springs, Montel draws inspiration from the desert’s silence and stillness—qualities that mirror the psychological landscapes he captures on canvas.
“There’s a kind of psychological distance in the desert that’s very close to what I try to express in my work,” he says.
With his latest series, including Lonely Together and Inner Cities, Montel invites viewers into an inner world that feels hauntingly familiar yet impossible to fully define. His background in psychology infuses each piece with a layered sense of introspection, bridging European emotional sensibility with the wide-open calm of the Californian desert.
Private studio viewings of Sébastien Montel’s work are available by appointment in both Palm Springs and Los Angeles. For those drawn to art that reflects the complicated beauty of being human, his canvases offer not resolution, but resonance.
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Website: sebastienmontel.com
Social: @sebastienmontel