David Simonetta is a French painter, born in 1983 in Paris. He drew throughout his childhood, creating large compositions inspired by comics and expressionist painting. At 18, he set drawing aside entirely to devote himself to philosophy. He entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon in 2005, passed the agrégation in philosophy in 2009, and specialized in the history of classical philosophy, which became the subject of his doctoral thesis (2015).

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In 2013, he returned to his first vocation and began studying in the atelier of painter Filip Mirazovic in Ivry-sur-Seine, where he learned oil painting techniques. He also worked in the studio of Marion Bataillard. In 2016, he became a philosophy teacher for final-year students at the Lycée Léonard de Vinci in Saint-Michel-sur-Orge. At that time, he began a series of paintings dedicated to the world of the Parisian suburbs—particularly southern Essonne—which will culminate in the 2025 exhibition “The Book of the World.”

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In 2022, he adapted Herman Melville’s short story Cocorico! into a “pictorial film” — a work composed of 120 fixed-shot tableaux, projected during a single screening on September 5, 2022, at Pathé Les Fauvettes in Paris.

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In September 2023, after seven years at the high school, he left teaching to devote himself entirely to painting.

Since December 2024, he has been imagining and developing, together with Étampes printer Nassib Traboulsi (Studio Declic), a series of leporellos — sequences of wordless images arranged as crafted objects, each copy signed — functioning as intermediaries between the original work and its reproduction.