Alexis Milleret is a French artist who develops his visual universe under the name Yharnam. His influences range across dark fantasy, science fiction, Art Nouveau and cosmic surrealism. His works give shape to a forgotten world, peopled with blind figures, altered bodies and biomechanical structures.
His work draws on dreams, nightmares and liminal states in which perception comes loose from reality. His experiences of sleep paralysis feed this imagery in particular: those moments when the mind seems awake while the body remains trapped become a source of visions, anxieties and questions. Rather than trying to channel his artistic expression, Alexis lets the work take hold of him, appear, transform and give way to dreams.
Cables and their biomechanical connections adorn this universe. Both bonds and shackles, they connect mind, body and space: they allow transmission and exchange, but can also seep in, cling on and exert a kind of hold, like the roots of a past that lingers. Blindness is just as omnipresent. It suggests the possibility of seeing beyond the visible and evokes ignorance as much as another form of perception. Between lucidity and denial, spirituality, transmutation, decadence and contemplation of the void meet; and behind the darkness and melancholy lies a poetic desire to depict the beauty within horror.
Self-taught, Alexis works mainly in digital painting. While the medium offers precision and freedom, he seeks above all to keep an instinctive, organic approach, leaving expression to gesture, accident and the unexpected. His work thus alternates between hazy, colour-soaked pieces and detailed black-and-white compositions dominated by metallic textures steeped in chiaroscuro. He extends this vision into music, as singer and composer of the black metal band Silhouette, and through collaborations with artists, bands and publishers on album sleeves, book covers, posters and visual identities. Each work thus reveals a new vision, like fragments of a lost memory.
