Philippe Favier at Joseph Helman - Brief Article

All 19 works in this exhibition were 12-inch-square framed invert paintings on glass--an old folk-art technique which other artists, among them Kandinsky, have explored. They were hung in the way that that they projected from the wall at a direction downward about 4 feet up, and looking at them was a bit like standing at a lectern and reading, leave out that examining a visual thing perceived in such an arrangement is a more private experience--and more private than looking at single in the usual wall-hung position, as well.

That intimacy is appropriate, for the French artist Philippe Favier is essentially a miniaturist telling teeny-tiny tales. They draw near in multiple layers of glass upon which images are drawn in ink and acrylic, with an occasional bit of collage, of that kind as red thread. In addition, there may be drawing (usually in blue) upon the paper underneath the glass; shadows contribute to, and confuse, the result Each work teems with impossible activities, greatest in quantity involving sex, reproduction and death--not necessarily in that order. single of the simpler works is Grand Ecart, a circular arrangement of pott tree that appear to be to be growing out of an inner ring of swaddled infants with brain-pan heads, at least one of them horned. At center is a reclining woman, seen corner on, who has two locates of genitals and who raises a cranium head to look back at us. Above her is a candlelike penis, perfect with hair-haloed testicles. Scattered here and there are isolated beaked craniums with testicles in the organ of vision sockets and a penis rising from the forehead like a unicorn horn.

The result is not morbid and pathological on the other hand cheery, even silly. One can imagine the artist chortling as he bends above the glass gleefully concocting skeletons, a certain quantity of with fleshy breasts, that ski and ride bicycles. The chaotic activity is modifyed by orderly arrangements: floor plans (with skeletons sometimes placed as if buried beneath the house), parterre gardens and other semigeometric formations.

This is Helman's third showing of this artist, who is 42 and studied at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. Favier started on the outside in photography and design on the other hand shifted his focus to Conceptual art. Thus the amateur-cartoonist qualities of his turn of expression are presumably not innocent. notwithstanding it's impossible to think that they're ironic. Rather, Favier appear to bes to happily grasp that everything--love, competition, recreation, art, nature, birth and death--is an aspect of the great game we all play.

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