Simon Diebold: Between Flesh and Mirage
In the work of Simon Diebold, flesh is no longer just a surface — it’s a battleground, a hallucination, a digital relic, a scream frozen mid-glitch. His art doesn’t just depict bodies; it dissects them, refracts them, reconfigures them into ghostly avatars wandering between the physical and the phantasmagoric.
From Synthetic Visions to Breathing Matter
Some images disturb gently. They float in a strange in-between, like dreams that slip away before they come into focus. Simon Diebold’s work lives there, in that liminal blur. His figures melt and glitch, as if identity itself — gender, age, flesh — had become liquid. Each portrait feels like a séance: the subject summoned, but never fully present. A ghost in the machine.
Simon Diebold, “Floating Thoughts”, 2021-2024
« Photography was never about the camera for me... The device is just one tool among many. What obsesses me is the final image — and I’ll use whatever it takes to pull what’s in my head into the frame. »
Simon Diebold, “Theater of dreams”, 2024
Trained in the sleek, high-spec backrooms of Lucasfilm’s VFX studios in London, with a stop at ESMA Montpellier, Franco-Alsatian artist Simon Diebold first learned to build entire worlds out of pixels. But the screen soon became a cage.
He craved friction — the grit of something real. The bluish glow of digital renders gave way to the rawness of a hand-painted backdrop, the rough grain of coarse fabric, the brutal honesty of a single bulb swinging in the dark.
Now based in Paris, Diebold steers his imagination away from the virtual — toward something messier, heavier, more alive. His vision slips from the synthetic into the tactile, pulling beauty from the tension between what’s fabricated and what breathes.
Handmade Illusions
Simon Diebold, “If my earth was flat”, 2024
In the shared Paris studio he occupies with photographer Gabriel Lenoble, Simon Diebold builds his visions by hand — obsessively, instinctively. Stitching, sculpting, painting, distorting. Mirrors are warped, silver prints developed in-house, props crafted like relics from a forgotten play. Here, his models become fragile, otherworldly beings — assembled with care, undone by intention.
Simon Diebold, “ Deconstructed”, 2024
« Every shoot is different... Sometimes I paint directly onto the photos. Sometimes I collage elements together before photographing them through a warped mirror,” he says. “I love that creative freedom — it means anything can happen. »
The resulting figures don’t quite belong to this world — or any other. Their posture is fractured, their gaze cracked open. They carry the softness of old Polaroids, but stand like elegant phantoms, half-formed memories caught mid-ritual. What emerges feels part trance, part fashion, part inner theatre — illusions crafted by hand, haunted by touch.
Blurred Bodies, Fragmented Realities
Simon Dielbold, “Le Wonder”, 2025
A finalist for the Picto Prize at Palais Galliera (2023) and exhibited under the curatorial eye of Hannibal Volkoff at Galerie Hors-Champs, Diebold has since extended his vision internationally: Shanghai, Beijing... and beyond.
In February 2025, he unveiled The Freaks as part of Le Ballet des Dieux — a procession of hybrid beings, half-crafted, half-haunted. Since then, something has shifted. On Instagram, sculpted faces emerge. Bodies take on volume. The surface is no longer enough. His images seem to want to escape the frame — to materialize, to become flesh.
Nothing official yet. But a metamorphosis is clearly underway. And with Diebold, as always: it will be instinctive, spectral, and radically embodied.
« For me, creating means inventing a space where I can speak about things I can’t express with words. »
Simon Diebold, “Theatre of Dreams”, 2024
