Gérald Panighi
Born on 1974, in Menton, France
Lives and works in Nice, France
Gérald Panighi’s work is an interdependent association between an image carefully neglected with a powerful reference and a text diverted from everyday life situations. The gap between the two triggers laughter or smile. His humor is often abrupt, sometimes dark, stressing our humanity and our imperfections, referring us back to our own reflection through the prism of his vision.
Gérald panighi’s art practice starts with sorting, a selection of images which are mostly from 1960’s comics. He appropriates characters which he then transfers by using tracing paper. Drawn in pencil, highlighted with watercolour, colour pencils, they spring to life on the page where they are something’s accompanied by aphorisms. Lost in the void, the fine and delicate line becomes a fragment, an instant of absurd life which by mixing the familiar with the incongruous engenders a disturbing strangeness. His drawings carry the traces and marks of their own creation. Stains and smudges of oil, ink, coffee, hand, or elbow prints surround the figures with an additional layer of matter, stressing the motif. The surface of the rough sheet- the slightly wrinkled or warped paper-also carries the scars of its passage in the studio, like so many ravages of time and haphazard care.
These accidents break down the mechanical aspect of the tracing and the working constraints which the artist imposes on himself: they constitute the true materially of the drawing.
In another part of his work, Gérald Panighi starts from aphorisms that come to his mind, like that, often in the evening, and that he types on sheets of paper of all sizes, such as the beginning or the passage possible of a novel. Then come the images that respond to these poetic sketches without ever really illustrating them, thus creating a sort of dialogue of the deaf.
Gérald Panighi practices drawing with a certain sense of economy, arranging large breathing zones in the white of the paper. Text and images conjure up furtive ideas here, flashes of the mind that just pass and leave room for immense emptiness.
