Dominique Sosolic was born in Ornas in 1950. While he was passionate about art from a young age, museum visits really set things in motion when it came to producing his own artworks. After completing a bachelor’s degree in science, Sosolic switched to a course to become an arts professor in Paris, around 1971. While practical courses were housed at l’Ecole Nationale des beaux-arts in Paris, technical classes took place at La Sorbonne, the Censier Art Institute, and the Collège de France. In these latter courses, Sosolic was particularly influenced by the lessons of René Huyghe.
Throughout this training, etching appeared to the artist as a revelation. He adopted etching as his main means of expression, cultivating a stylistic process around the technique. After a year of mandatory military service, Sosolic was named professor of fine arts in Strasbourg, where he led the public etching work seminars ‘Estampe du Rhin’, among others, and divided his time between teaching and creating. These joint experiences allowed him to meet local artists and etching collectors, such as Adrien Schaeffer and Robert Stehelin.
Sosolic deems his preferred technique of etching to be a self-sufficient art form governed by its own rules and sensibilities. Subjects approached through the practice must be done in perfect harmony with the chosen technique. Style, emotion and meaning are not achieved through subtraction the same way they are through an additive method. Material, depth and carving all require their own expressive considerations that must be both understood and respected. Sosolic defines this as the dialogue between the sensible and the intangible — a dichotomy identified as the goal of his corpus.
As such, his body of work dons a purposeful anachronistic quality that echoes the temporal nature of etching as a technique, during which time is suspended, allowing for the mind, the hand, the tools and the materials to symbiotically interact. The subjects Sosolic depicts highlight this atemporal aspect, while his musical scores, farm animals, open books and translucent glassware invoke still lifes of centuries past.
