One day, in the 1990s, Francis Limérat bought… 1 million matches! Since then, the artist has made a number of works of art from these sticks – without the sulfur head, of course.
Some of them can be found at the Convergences gallery where Valérie Grais offers a retrospective of half a century (1972-2022) of the artist's work, whose creations appear in numerous private and public collections (museum of modern art in Paris, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts, etc.).
“The match corresponds to the elementary stage of learning,” says this modest proponent of the art who happily works with pruning shears on twigs and branches.
Francis Limérat, Convergences gallery
At the gallery on rue des Coutures-Saint-Gervais, it is also his drawings which occupy the majority of the two floors. Like his matchstick compositions, these are disarmingly simple – an original purity, one should say, which owes much to the primitive arts of Oceania.
His line of black ink, drawn on paper rubbed with emery cloth, is inspired by that of the traditional cartographers of Micronesia, Melanesia or the Marshall Islands. To indicate to their descendants fish areas and dangerous currents, fishermen composed unique copies of maritime maps, made using twigs, transmitted from generation to generation.
Limérat's compositions have a mysterious force of nature and the finesse of Japan or the aesthetics of white, with its shades of gray, constitutes a genre in itself, as it is wonderfully described in one of Limérat's bedside books. the artist: In Praise of the Shadow, by Junichirô Tanizaki (1933).
It's no surprise, then, that Francis Limérat's works made buyers snap like twigs on the evening of the opening.
Drawings 1972/2022 until November 12, 2022
▼ Francis Limérat
▼ Convergences Gallery
22 Rue des Coutures Saint-Gervais, 75003 Paris
From Tuesday to Saturday
14AM - 19PM
Tel. : +06 24 54 03 09 XNUMX
Francis Limérat, Convergences gallery
24.10.22
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Susumu Shingu, praise of slowness
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