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Jean-Michel was born in France in 1988. He has been doing digitally generated pictures since 2008 after finishing his studies in an animation school in France. First he started working for movies and commercials, doing special effects and fully 3d animated visuals. This led him to work for famous brands and feature films. This demanding production environment allowed him to sharpen his taste for detailed and photorealistic images. He truly initiated his own artistic approach back in 2016. It's the time it took both to master the technical aspects of the digital medium and the maturation necessary for the emergence of subjects that touched him. Child of two artists using traditional supports, he has always been attached to the beauty of the material, the gesture and more generally to a certain figurative realism in art. As a child of the digital generation, he fully embraces this medium with infinite potential which offers a complete freedom of expression. However, he always ensure that the digital side of his artworks is not what characterizes them in the first place. Building a 3D picture requires a lot of technical knowledge and it can easily look dull. So many steps are involved in the process of creating the final picture, the artist needs to have a clear view of what he aims to achieve. Also, where most traditional artists try to get a perfect control over reality, a digital artist fights against the digital perfection of 3D imagery, always adding some imperfections to get nearer from what makes a subject real and deep. His artistic approach leads him to anchor his images in a form of visual realism. Jean-Michel aspires to create a link between the contemporary medium and the traditional know-how on which he was brought up. This mainly involves reproducing the look of traditional materials and details to give visual plausibility to dreamlike subjects. It also involves engaging with lighting to enhance the perception of the volumes and the different properties of the material to make them almost graspable. Although virtual, his subjects always have an aesthetic that could be described as classic. With his artworks, Jean-Michel Bihorel always walks on a thin line between classical and supernatural.

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