Wandering the Borderlands ─ A painting exhibition by Pier Fichefeux

Wandering the Borderlands: Artist talk and gallery walkthrough with Pier Fichefeux. Exhibition on view: August 3rd to September 27th, 2024.
Storytelling is a fundamental activity of all humans. Karl Jung famously suggested that iconography and symbology in storytelling - whether in religion, cultural myth, or in our dreams - is shared in a “collective unconscious.” Wandering the Borderlands is the expression and expansion of a language, an illuminated manuscript of Pier Fichefeux’s forty-year creative journey from France to New York to Hawai‘i.
Fichefeux was born in Paris, the son of a comparative theologian and historian specializing in the early Middle Ages. His childhood was populated with numinous images from the walls of dim churches built atop earlier churches. His imagination was seeded with pre-flood, demonic crawling and flying creatures - characters and caricatures which came to inhabit and animate his paintings.
A Medieval Christian image imprinted upon the artist as a young child - la Virgen de Misericordia, the shrouded form of Mary enclosing a village under her metaphorical wings. It reappears in multiple forms throughout his works, initially becoming a huge bird, a hill or a mountain, later a volcano, or still later a sonogram of the artist’s son in utero.
In a flea market in Paris, when he was just out of high school, the young artist sold his first sculpture, a metal automaton cobbled together from parts scavenged in scrap yards. He shared his notebook drawings of grand automata that he planned to build with the unknown buyer, who propitiously turned out to be the artist, musician, and film maker David Lynch, who Fichefeux had admired.
Fichefeux used the money from selling the sculpture to fly to Japan, returning to France a few months later broke and homeless. One of his clients from the Paris flea market hired him to sit his gallery, where Fichefeux learned Photoshop and began creating illustrations and graphics for advertising. He received a scholarship to Fabrica, a research center in Italy, and his career in digital advertising began.
Two years later, Fichefeux moved to Amsterdam, where, inspired by a chance encounter with an artist in a park, he traded his digital pad for a notebook and pencil, and began to draw and paint in earnest. A few years later he moved to New York and signed with a noted gallery.
Fichefeux painted in New York for six years. Traveling to visit remote regions of the world, he developed a personal relationship with Mauna Loa, an active volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. With his wife and family, he moved to the island, establishing a studio on the slopes of Mauna Loa. Here, the figure of the Virgen de Misericordia found form as a volcano.
Says Fichefeux, “Hawai‘i is the farthest place I can go from my home in France. Since I was a kid I’ve been inspired by volcanoes. I’ve traveled to many volcanoes around the world. Pierre means stone. Fichefeux means fire-starter.
“Being in Hawai‘i is not an accident. It is the beginning of a dialogue between me, and you, who are at the far ends of the world. Hawaii is a geological manifestation of Jung’s symbology, a treasure map of consciousness, and more, of deity, spirit, and mythological time.
“My personal relationship is with Mauna Loa to the shore. I live on her slopes. I witnessed the lava from the most recent eruption in 2022, stopping thirty feet from my mountain studio. When you look at my paintings, search for the witness. It’s always there.”
Fichefeux recalls how children would give his father any random word, and he would stare into the fire, then improvise stories. Themes might carry through days. There is a visual soundtrack that carries through the stories in Wandering the Borderlands. Each begins with a word, improvised and elaborated upon, a story echoing theology, mythology and dreams - immutable themes, the motifs evolving with time and place.
This exhibition was made possible by funding from the County of Hawai’i; McInerny Foundation - Bank of Hawai’i, Trustee; and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.
Webpage: ehcc.org/conte...

[@terryparmer1708]

I love these, very inspiring

[@TheSkoomaHistorySociety007]

the real art here is getting someone to exhibit something this uninspiring