Gallizia Arnaud (France)

Painting

Photography

Drawing

Guest

Study for Romano

Woman with blue sofa

Universe's Hotel

The Descent

Loiret

Portrait II

Face I

Born 1986. Lives and works in Paris, France.

We enter upon the different key stages of his body of research. First, the charcoal that Arnaud Gallizia, as a wood aficionado, made himself by working the material. He quotes Giacometti to convey the importance of doing everything yourself, including the canvas to which each treatment will give substance, light and grain upon what it carries: "One must sharpen the paper like a diamond."

The result is a serie of human portraits whose faces and hands appear mysteriously blurred while juxtaposing precise body movements. Whether they are grouped (where we attempt to imagine various self-portraits in their centres) or alone, the characters are both distinct and elusive at the same time, granting the viewer freedom of interpretation. There is very little Judeo-Christian influence in this abstention of depicting faces. It rather stems from a Japanese inspiration, notably originating from the films of Kitano or mangas where the characters do not hold expressions.

Whether the photographs Arnaud Gallizia often starts working from are the famous photo of Rimbaud in Somalia or more conventional portraits, he picks them blurry to his liking: he wants movement to emerge from space. "I almost destroy them when I put them up.". When he occasionally chooses his own photos (two landscapes on display), he gets the sensation of interpreting his own work. In the charcoal drawings, the approach is oblique to give a direct feeling of volume to the canvas' plain "in volume" and thus provoking the illusion of movement.

Paradoxically, the resulting feelings that emanate through Arnaud's paintings where he uses colors he made himself are almost more hieratic and anguished than the nervous and racy impressions of his charcoal drawings: a woman hunched back in front of her blue divan, turning her back to the viewer, a man asleep on a pink sofa in front of his staring dog, a portrait of a woman lying down between two undefined spaces as trapped between two horizons, concealing her upper-body behind the wall of the first space and only revealing her legs to the viewer. This latter painting that featured the exhibition poster is even more ethereal than an empty living room of architects in unconventional colors. The result is beautiful and haunting, and we are eager to see the following series of this still-evolving artist.

- Yaël Hirsch.

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