Philippe Demeillier is a French painter, sculptor and maker of extraordinary animated constructions that are products of a fantastic and fertile imagination. His images and ideas are drawn from a personal bestiary of birds and boars, dogs and dragons, creatures with wings and wheels and propellers that buzz and flap, speak and crackle with simulated life. His sculptures are painted, and his paintings are windows to a world of faces and figures drawn from his life and environment, but transformed and distorted in ways that are reminiscent of the work of other artists from Bosch to Bacon. Influences from the Surrealists to the art of children, primitives and madmen are absorbed and distilled into a powerful personal vision that is sometimes shocking but often witty and satirical. His themes and titles are clever and poetic games with words and ideas, French literature, slang and puns, aimed at political and social orthodoxies and absurdities. He works with the traditional materials and tools of the artist with a skill and facility that is rare at present. In his constructions he recycles the discards of a consumerist society - car bonnets and parts, motors and electronic components to give them a new life as art. His work is an emotional and intellectual critique of the shallow conceptualism and empty abstraction of contemporary art.