Gérald Panighi

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