Artiste

Born in 1974 in Menton.

Lives and works in Nice.

A graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of the Villa Arson in Nice, Gérald Panighi works on paper by juxtaposing texts and images, between furtive ideas, anecdotes or thoughts as thrown on paper. Combining highly referenced image, falsely neglected and diverted text, which stages everyday situations, the discrepancy between the two translates the humor of the artist. Although it is black or abrupt, it emphasizes our imperfections and our humanity and refers us to our own vision of ourselves through the prism of its reflection.

The artist cultivates detail and makes it the main subject of his works, the line lost in the void becomes absurd fragment, which mixes the familiar with the incongruous and makes spout a disturbing strangeness. His drawings are the witnesses of their realization and bear his trace: stains, halo, marks of hands or elbows highlight the delicacy of the paper but also its fragility. The surface of the sheet, crumpled, warped and rugged, keeps the scars of plastic work, like marks of time.

« Upon seeing Gerald Panighi’s works for the first time, evidently my eyes strayed to the stunning explosion of work casually invading an entire wall as if they were ordinary Post-Its. There is much to see and read in Gerald’s work. It may sound silly, but I immediately said to myself that he must have feasted on a lot of Strange as many boys of his generation and perhaps even read alarming issues of ”Detective » in his childhood – where the punches, despite the hyper-expressivity of the individuals drawn by Angelo Di Marco, are not only onomatopoeic. In these early days of his life, he may have also remained puzzled by Magritte’s « This is not a pipe », an attractive anti-tautology after all…

If the representation is not real, the combined dissociation of the process beloved of the Surrealists has a more abstruse charm. Nothing is more enigmatically captivating than the assumed dysfunction of the image. We enjoyed it with Magritte as we revered it in the 80s, in the trivial world of Glenn Baxter’s illustrations… The absurd is the answer to all occlusive, ridiculous speculation and it is precisely that that manages to be deliciously enjoyable (without the slightest pretence) in the work of Gerald Panighi. »

Michèle Goarant, 2011