My Biogra-Phi...
φ - Phi, curious name for an artist, isn't it ? However, it is the one that I chose when I was a child, already traced on the back of my first drawings. The Phi of philosophy, the Phi of physics. Happy combination of wisdom and relationship with the world.
I was born in 1968 in Paris. An accident… in reality I am 100% Breton. At high school, I took a Baccalaureate in Visual Arts. I drew and painted a lot during my younger years. I remember the portraits of Holbein the Younger in pencil... And then I put aside creation for a while, to study.
For 25 years I was a senior lecturer in art history at the French University (specialist in 16th-19th century Western art). I returned to creation gradually and I was able to set up, with a painting restorer friend, practical workshops on the theme of “ancient artistic know-how, painting in the manner of…”. An experience which led us to wonderful exhibitions of student work, some of whom had never touched a paintbrush. Until the day when the irrepressible need to come back to oneself, to be oneself and nothing else, was felt. To undo oneself in order to be better reborn, as a portrait painter and a copyist painter!
φ - Phi
My artistic approach
My creative work talks about the material, the thickness, the textures of the oil, the gloss, the opaque, but above all the colors. Those who mix, those who don't want to. My paintings, in a hyper-realistic style, are inspired by childhood faces, but not only; things of nature, animals, expressions of life; visible emotions, the way of painting them and projecting them, outside the painting.
In my career, in-depth knowledge of artistic heritage is essential: gestures, techniques, supports, binders, pigments. I like to reproduce the painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, observing them, thinking about their choices. It is a look at tradition: those of the masters of the Renaissance or the Baroque age. These are omnipresent in my journey as an artist, inspiring and guiding it.
My experience
It is based on a sound knowledge of the materials and oil techniques used by painters in days gone by. Knowledge acquired as a university researcher.
So my quest as an artist is not just a matter of practising and experimenting in my studio, using the possibilities offered by contemporary materials. This quest goes hand in hand with a reflection on our relationship with time. A lot has changed since the last few centuries: mentalities, individuals, beliefs and tastes, original gestures and materials, and so on.
To paint is to apprehend this universe.
My thinking as an artist goes hand in hand with an interest in the ancient testimonies left by artists and their contemporaries, in the form of handwritten or printed texts. These provide invaluable information about their lives, their daily lives, their relationships with their colleagues or their clientele, and their taste in art. This journey alongside them, so close and yet so far away, is my main source of inspiration.
Phi
