Contemporary sculptor Darbaud was born in 1943 in Aix en Provence. After his secondary education he joined the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the classes of Jacques Busse, Jean Aujame and Ozip Zadkine.

For many years he worked as a set designer on numerous films for cinema and television and at the same time pursued his activity as a painter and sculptor.

In 1993 he exhibited a series of large drawings in graphite on wood at the Touchaleaume Gallery and moved to the South of France where he created and ran a painting and sculpture academy.

In 2000, he started to work on a sculpture of purely Africanist inspiration, which very quickly found its audience in the context of major events in Paris at the PAD, Brussels at the BRAFA, Antwerp, Geneva, Miami in the context of ART BASEL.

His works are part of numerous national and international private collections.

His naturalist style draws its inspiration from old photographic documents and obeys a permanent concern to capture in clay all those "details" of identity: headdress, jewellery, scarifications... which will then be magnified by the bronze.

It is perhaps this care with which he tries to translate the detail that gives his sculptures and more particularly his portraits an almost ethnographic character.

In addition to sculpture, he is also happy to create light sculptures and design objects.

This multi-talented man, allergic to worldliness, loving solitude without an ounce of misanthropy, withdrawn in his universe but open to the world, hating travel but travelling the universe from his studio through books, cultivates a part of mystery close to the African griots.