After meeting the man, I discovered his art. After admiring his art, I recognized his talent. These three shocks - each of an incredible, amazing violence - sparked rare and paradoxical emotions that made me want to share this work with others.

Stefan is an utter aesthete, an unlikely traveler in a consumer age, who turns his rebellions into art and then graciously but mischievously offers them us.

Both a storyteller and a painter, he reinvents the romance of the recent past and then holds up that reinvention to us like a weird mirror of our memory in which fears, hopes, and despairs converge. In this dreamlike voyage through Diesel City, noir prevails, telling about pain in a wide range of shades of gray to better serve the very idea of light - little as there may be. In Stefan's work everything is a reference to something else, even if most of those references are elegantly concealed. Intelligence dominates this work that is both literary and graphic, both disconcerting and fully realized.

Don't be surprised, though. We're in a dream. Everything is possible.

The Publisher

Diesel punk or cool gasoline engine, it doesn't matter about the bottle, so long as you get drunk. Stefan's motor runs on fossil fuels. When he lets us into his own metropolis, Diesel City, we can immediately hear the police sirens and the swing music from speakeasies. It's the America of Al Capone and Howard Hughes. It's the architecture of Chicago and Raymond Loewy's « Streamline Moderne. » It's both Ziegfeld girls and the space aliens of Roswell in their bizarre ships. We know this world - whether in color or black-and-white. At least we used to know it, even if it's looking a little rusty today. But the artist doesn't just go the vintage route. Nor are his illustrations simply flashbacks either. Rather, everywhere in Diesel City - the people, the skyscrapers, the « look » - we see hints of an imagined « future perfect. » These images pose the fragile question of time, of life after the quantic bomb. They speak of the profusion of images that saturate our society today. Of the images of those images. Of the shadows of those images of images. Even of the reflections of the shadows of those images of images. To live in our world and also to penetrate this one isn't a banal dream-like voyage. It's déjà vu. We know this city. We've lived there. But when ? And was it really we who lived there ? The great paradox in Stefan's work is that the more familiar the reference points in Diesel City, the harder it is to get our bearings. And that's saying something.