Jean Pierre Formica — Métamorphoses — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 21 → April 27, 2013

Since the 1970s Jean-Pierre Formica has drawn his inspiration from Mediterranean culture. He works on bull fighting and mythological themes and in this way on memory, traces, prints, accumulation, sedimentation. An approach which finds its expression in paintings, drawings, wash drawings but also engravings. His path crossed that of Christian Lacroix with whom he collaborated on several haute couture projects.

From the 1990s onwards, he executed the series story in a story: lunch on the lawn, Sardanapale, homage to Bacon, Tarzan or also Odalisque. After having neutralised his “emblems” by using them in a repetitive system, he imbues them with a generic character. A painter above all else, he offers us paintings drawn from the genealogy of image but above all the substance of which it is made. This work constructed from fragments and repetition becomes a whole. The apparition of another figure takes place, that of a world of imaginary form: paintings, water colours, charcoal drawings lead to the birth of the expression of a new nature.

He has had exhibitions at the Chapelle des Jésuites in Nîmes, the Musée des Oudayat in Rabat, Fortant de France in Sète, Musée de Toulon, Musée de Montbéliard, Institut français in Tel Haviv. Starting in 2000, his sculptures increasingly moved centre stage of his work. First of all earthenware or bronze made from moulds, a kind of modern archaeology that culminate in the resurfacing of water in salt sculptures: gnarled forms, hybrid amphora or indeed thousands of mannequins in a buried army. He has presented this new nature to MAMAC in Nice, the Espace Paul Riquet in Béziers, or indeed at the Espace Vallès in Grenoble.

He was commissioned for the Nuit blanche 2008 where he presented his installation of a salt army. In 2010, it invested the Pommery cellars experience for No. 7 for which a non-standard Beaux Arts Magazine will be dedicated to inaugurate the space and Pommery Liege. In 2012 he did two exhibitions at the beaux arts Muséum and at the beaux arts school of Nimes. His work on bullfighting has never left. Drawings, wash drawings, sketches, books are always developed bullfight. It will be released in the spring with Actes Sud a book on bullfighting books.

Born in Uchaid (Gard) in 1946, Jean-Pierre Formica lives and works between Paris and Aigues Mortes. He is a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Paris and Montpelier. He lectures at the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture Val de Seine.