Gérald Panighi

It is a pleasure to invite you to discover Gérald Panighi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. It brings together a group of recent drawings, carefully staged by the artist, for whom the way the works are arranged on the wall has been an integral part of his practice since his early days.

Graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de la Villa Arson in Nice in 2001, Gérald Panighi works on paper, juxtaposing text and image, somewhere between fleeting ideas, anecdotes and thoughts seemingly tossed onto the page. He combines a heavily referenced, deceptively careless image with diverted text that stages everyday situations, and the gap between the two conveys the artist’s sense of humor. Although this humor is dark, even abrupt, it puts the emphasis on our imperfections and our humanity, and sends us back to our own vision of ourselves through the prism of his reflection.

« Of course, when I first saw Gérald Panighi's little vignettes covering an entire wall with a certain nonchalance, as if they were nothing more than ordinary Post-it notes, my gaze wandered to this dizzying atomization. There is indeed much to see and read in Gérald's work. Immediately, though this is certainly a bit silly, I thought to myself that he must have... He devoured a fair amount of Strange comics, like many boys of his generation, and perhaps even stumbled upon some traumatic issues of "Detective" in his childhood, where the blows exchanged, despite the hyper-expressiveness of the characters drawn by Angelo Di Marco, generated more than just onomatopoeia. At that distant time in his life, he may also have remained quite perplexed by Magritte's "This is not a pipe," such a seductive anti-tautology, after all… If representation is not reality, the combined dissociation, so dear to the Surrealists, possesses an even more abstruse charm. Nothing is more enigmatically bewitching than this deliberate dysfunction of the image. It was appreciated in Magritte, just as it was venerated in the 1980s, in the more trivial world of illustration in Glenn Baxter… The absurd is the occlusive answer to all derisory speculations, and it is precisely this that succeeds in To be deliciously enjoyable without ever oozing the slightest pretension in Gérald Panighi's creations.»

Michèle Goarant, 2011

Gérald. I have to talk about Gérald Panighi. So it's hard to be objective, he's a friend. Anyway, I like what he does. I like the man, always worried, always dramatizing every situation, even the most ordinary ones, and I like his work, which looks like him: little phrases from everyday reality that turn funny and a bit sad. When I buy Nice-Matin, I read the international politics, while Gérald loves the faits divers. You could say Gérald's territory is the faits divers, everyday stories. He calls me from China to tell me that three people died in China, in a Carrefour, in a stampede over rapeseed oil on special offer. Gérald is the one who lent me Bukowski, and I lent him John Fante. Sometimes I compare Gérald to George Brecht, who considered that a wink was a work of art. When you look at his drawings, it's as if he were saying: on the scales of contemporary art, a simple sentence taken from daily life weighs as much as a pontificating ten-ton work, and all you have to do is look at them and read them to be convinced.

Ben, 2011