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Sophie Duhem (Phi-Artiste-Peintre)
FRANCE
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“Painting with oils is my conversation with centuries of wisdom.”
Duhem Sophie, who signs her work as Phi Artiste Peintre, is a painter whose art merges philosophy, physics, and emotion into a single visual language. The name Phi has followed her since childhood, when she first wrote it on the back of her early drawings. It reflects both her love of inquiry and her connection to the harmony of the world. Based in Toulouse, France, she continues to explore painting as a meeting place of thought, matter, and time. Her creative approach combines intuition and discipline, transforming ancient oil techniques into a deeply personal expression.
Stomatopoda's Ballet | Oil
Ballet of Squilles’ is a peaceful underwater vision, where two scenes, two contrasting moments, are juxtaposed: that of the stillness of the undulating seabed, whose clear waters reveal in the distance landscapes of a certain strangeness, almost lunar; and the fleeting instant of life and movement, suggested by an improbable ballet of multicoloured arthropods, otherwise known as ‘mantis shrimps’, small predators in search of microscopic sustenance amid the stirred sand and seaweed.
Phi Artiste’s paintings are known for their tactile quality and reverence for the physical substance of oil paint. She is not interested in reproducing reality but in revealing its inner vibration. Every brushstroke, glaze, and texture carries the mark of the human hand. Her paintings are alive with quiet energy and tension between control and spontaneity. She seeks the moment when the visible begins to breathe, when color and light reveal the life within the material.
Miura | Oil
The Summer Dream series is a tribute to European car manufacturers and metalworkers, to their sense of aesthetics, lines, and colors. To their extraordinary technical expertise. The "Miura" is an exceptional Lamborghini, whose project was born at the Turin Motor Show in 1965. It is the result of a collaboration between the coachbuilder Nuccio Bertone (1914-1997) and Ferruccio Lamborghini (1916-1993). This "creature" is a perfect aesthetic expression of modernity..
Born in Paris in 1968, with family roots in Lower Brittany, she grew up surrounded by the artistic and cultural richness of France. She earned her Baccalauréat in Visual Arts after years devoted to drawing and painting. Later she turned toward art history, which she studied with equal passion. For nearly three decades, she has lectured on early modern art at the University of Toulouse, focusing on the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. This academic experience eventually led her back to painting, connecting research and creation in a new way.
“In each layer of paint, I leave the memory of time.”
Through teaching, she rediscovered the forgotten languages of paint. Her fascination with historic techniques and the recipes of old masters became the bridge between scholarship and artistry. These traditional methods, once exchanged in the secrecy of workshops, offered her a path back to the act of making. Returning to painting in 2015, she approached it with both reverence and curiosity. In reinterpreting these practices, she found continuity with the past and a renewed freedom in her own gesture.
Diablo | Oil
‘Diablo’ is a Lamborghini supercar designed around 1990 by stylist and designer Marcello Gandini (1938-2024), creator of most of the models that have left their mark on the brand's history. This car is also a reference to a fighting bull, the Madrid bullring and Ferruccio Lamborghini's keen interest in bullfighting. What delight for the painter to be able to seize these iridescent reflections on aluminum alloys, composites, and glass.
The Shelby Cobra was unveiled at the New York Motor Show in 1962. It was designed as a result of a collaboration between Texan racing driver Carroll Shelby (1923–2012) and the British firm AC Cars Group Ltd, established in 1901 in the London borough of Lambeth.Its curves and rounded lines offer the possibility of creating surprising reflections with unexpected contours.
Cobra | Oil
Her artistic practice centers on the study of material. She is captivated by the depth and luminosity of oil paint, by how color resists, blends, and transforms through time. She works slowly, applying layers that reveal a history within each surface. The physical process of painting becomes a meditation on light, texture, and rhythm. Her palette choices are deliberate yet intuitive, allowing color to carry emotion as much as meaning.
“Through painting, I travel across time, learning from forgotten recipes, listening to pigments, and leaving my mark in dialogue with artists whose hands shaped history.”
“When I paint, I feel as if I am speaking to time itself. Each brushstroke is an echo of voices that have whispered through centuries, sharing their secrets through color and texture. The process of painting with oils is a slow conversation between matter and memory. I am both artist and historian, translating knowledge from the past into a language that still breathes today. The so-called recipes of the trade fascinate me, not as formulas to imitate, but as living wisdom that evolves through the hand of every artist who practices it. When I work, I prepare my pigments and surfaces with the same care as those before me, knowing that their gestures continue through mine. What I seek is not perfection but presence, the moment when technique becomes intuition and material turns luminous. In that quiet space, I leave my imprint, a humble continuation of a dialogue that began long before me and will continue long after.”
Her subjects range from faces and figures to landscapes and still life. She paints childhood memories, natural forms, and fleeting gestures that speak of vitality and tenderness. Within these scenes, human beings and animals often appear suspended, distant from the world yet connected through silence. The result is a balance between dream and observation. Each work creates a moment of stillness that invites the viewer into quiet reflection.
La Nuit | Oil
This landscape is an evocation of Le Touquet, a small seaside town well-known to the French. This painting of the evening twilight conveys calm and serenity, though in reality, behind the curtain of dense shrubs, tourists wander back and forth along the long promenade that runs parallel to the vast beach of this wild coast. It’s the favourite holiday spot for strollers who come to marvel at the sunset and enjoy the low-angled light over the dunes and sand. The sky is caught between two states.
As a landscape painter, she is drawn to the brief harmonies of light and form that nature offers. Her aim is not to copy the visible world but to reveal the feeling it evokes. The landscapes she creates are peaceful visions, distilled from emotion and contemplation. Her preparatory process is deliberate, involving the rewriting of entire compositions until the right balance emerges. Through this effort she achieves serenity on the canvas, even when the path to it is filled with tension and persistence.
Thorlak, God of the oases | Oil
I am a god who makes my masters dream, the god of oases who watches over them, protects them, speaks to them face to face. I am a god who plays. I seem to enjoy tearing up a blanket. In fact, I play with your nerves – because I am pure, uncontrollable and destructive energy. That is what it means to be a god, to be a Malinois: to be able to appear in this world, to capture attention, to disconcert, to bring forgotten chaos back into the orderly universe of men.
When painting objects, she explores the mystery of reflection and iridescence. Glass, metal, and polished surfaces challenge her to capture shifting light and its subtle transformations. This work demands patience and precision, for every layer of oil changes the depth of reflection. Over time, the object seems to glow from within, transformed into something almost spiritual. In these paintings, the technique becomes poetic, and light becomes a metaphor for transformation.
One summer morning in the South. It is very early, and sunlight floods the kitchen. The child is already there, his face dazzled by the bright light. Leaning on the bar, grimacing. The raspberry ice cream does not ease the pain; it runs down his red throat. The aroma and the sugar distract him a little. He has just had an operation. He is in pain, a lot of pain.
As an artist, this moment and this light appeal to me. A palette of yellows, pinks and ochres. The crimson red of his lips....
Pain | Oil
“Every gesture connects me to the masters who came before.”
Le Jouet | Oil
Children's water games. A theme that confronts the painter with a work on water, water that slides, water that moves or stagnates, water in oil and oil in water. Water through which images are distorted, water that also sticks T-shirts to the skin. Effects of transparency, colours, wetness, play of light and shadow. A difficult exercise for the painter.
She views painting as a process that begins long before the image appears. It starts with the careful preparation of the canvas, the mixing of pigments, and the quiet study of gesture. Each stage holds significance, for creation is not a single act but a series of mindful choices. To her, a painting is not a surface to observe but a depth to enter, where the unseen takes visible form. Through this intimate engagement, she discovers meaning within the act of making.
Energy Time is a painting inspired by the excitement of 1950s jazz music. It depicts a man in his prime, standing under the blazing summer sun. His eyes, black holes lost in the shadows, form two expressive spots. The man I have painted here is Sienna, or rather, the Red Man. He is handsome and strong. He stands there, frozen in a vibrant, energetic pose that suggests a story of resilience and pride.
Energy Time | Oil
Whether studying a Renaissance treatise or standing before a modern canvas, Duhem Sophie searches for the same universal thread that links all painters. Through her work, she explores the connection between the visible and the eternal, the gesture and the spirit. Painting is her dialogue with history, her method of learning through doing, and her way of sharing what she finds. Her art reminds us that creation is not imitation but revelation. Within each piece, she leaves a trace of her humanity, extending the conversation between artist, material, and time.
Ovalie | Oil
Ovalie is much more than a game: it is an identity and a heritage. It is the grip of bodies on space. Bodies that surge forward and seek the breach, bodies that confront gravity and inscribe their movement in the earth, the resistance of the air, and the scrum. In the scrum, everything tightens, in the dull roar of masses clashing. In Toulouse, this force has an accent, a memory. It wears red and black.
“Art is matter made spirit through patience, study, and love.”
Sophie Duhem (Phi-Artiste-Peintre)
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