Bayetto was born in Quimperlé in France’s Finistère in 1962.

He lives and works in Paris.

As a child, he discovers a book on the Italian Renaissance. Fascinated by the masters’ dexterity and talent in rendering the beauty of carnations, he tries his hand at drawing by copying the reproductions he finds in the book.

In 1981, he chooses Paris to pursue studies as a developmental therapist at the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital. While taking university courses in Freudian metapsychology, body meditation and art therapy—subjects that will become fundamental to the ontology of his work as a painter—he continues his self-education in pictorial experimentation. There is a space of paradox where, finally, rigidity is not rigor: painting renders the impossible of the real.

In 1986, he has his first exhibit at the Entrepôt in Paris.

He finishes his studies with a dissertation on « Corporeal resonance in graphic design » and will work for seven years as a psychotherapist with autistic and psychotic children. At the Santos Dumont hospital in Paris, he creates an art therapy workshop and participates in studies on the psychopathology of artistic expression.

His collaborations as an illustrator follow upon encounters made during his exhibits and draw him into the world of media and communications. In 1990, after a year-long program at the media school Conforma, he and two other graphic designers create the agency Félicie aussi. This collaboration will last for eight years and introduce him to the pragmatics of communication and the Taylorization of notions as subjective as color and typography…

Little by little, Bayetto abandons the spectacularity of large-scale glossy paper and composes original spaces in oil paint and on canvas-covered frames. With reference to American abstract expressionism, and particularly to Rothko, he explores the curious in the ordinary. The limit becomes a recurrent motif in a model that is interior and partial. Heroes start as tutelary figures and become familiar presences. From within this proximity, the knowing master takes his distances and the naïf speaks. « Certainty makes men mad, » said Nietzsche. Form is dangerous. As the limit multiplies and unfurls, it turns into vibration and structure becomes elusive. Content, form, and color are affairs of state: this provides the articulation for his series of « Chambres, » exhibited in 1995 at the Duplex in Paris.

The pursuit of this reflection will lead to the « GrAy-flags » exhibited in 2005 at Hubert Karaly in Paris. This sequence of five paintings proposes work in the abstraction of colors. Extracting from symbols—here, the gay flag—their nomenclature of colors (CMYK) to keep only their form. When a symbol’s formal integrity is degraded, what does it become?

« Can images kill? » asks Marie-José Mondzain in her book of the same title. How can we escape the atopia of an imaginary that closes up onto itself? During the multimedia era, painting can present something that is not an image and can interrogate the gaze.

Iconoclastic painting: what a handsome oxymoron. What could be more subversive than subjectivity?

Starting in 2008, this approach, one he calls humanist, brings Bayetto to work on Goethe’s color circle (the colored darkness of physiological colors) and the alterity of the human figure. In his series « E-jizz, » begun in 2010 and published in the magazine Monstre in May 2012, the images’ vulgarity lets the iridescence of colors destroy these representations gleaned from the internet. Using the mad history of men who claim to communicate but only seek to correspond, he interrogates « great painting. » In this colored pamphlet, the art-looker and the « beautiful » become incongruous elements in a legion of headless beings. The axis of the gaze is perpendicular to the painting’s plane. A third-dimensional tangent is thus created—the tangent of the senses. Isn’t the world round like an orange?

1986: L’Entrepôt, Paris
1988: Galerie metamorphose, group exhibit, Paris
1989:Hôtel de Bourienne, group exhibit, Paris
1990: L’Espace européen, Paris
1990: Maison de la culture de Montmorency, Montmorency
1991: Le Duplex, Paris
1992: Galerie métamorphose, group exhibit, Paris
1993: Espace Cardin, group exhibit, Paris
1994: Le Duplex, Paris
1997: La Rhénania, group exhibit, Cologne
1997: Galérie Éof, group exhibit, Paris
2005: Hubert Karaly, Paris
2007: Le Duplex, Paris
2012: Galerie De Roussan, Magazine Monstre, group exhibit, Paris
2012: L’entresol, Paris
2014: Hubert Karaly, Paris