Frédéric Di Martino

Frédéric Di Martino, a young painter of Nîmes origin, takes over the Contemporary Art Space at Château d'O and part of its park. On the two floors of the exhibition space, he presents his paintings on canvas, the most recent works (2003-2004), and creates four murals in situ, including one outside (monumental painting on a wooden fence near the mirror of 'O). Frédéric Di Martino's painting is immediately visible. By the simplicity of the forms, the liveliness of the color, the frontality of the image - choice of a tight framing on the object - which "shows" more than it represents and by the ingenious system implemented: associations of ideas, analogies or combinations of various elements. The latter offers with humor and ingenuity a whimsical and poetic universe.

The painter generally ignores the relationships of scale, his motifs are often oversized with regard to the backgrounds and if he recognizes the surrealist character of his images (we think of René Magritte for example) he prefers to call "things" rather than "objects. "the elements, apparently so contradictory, that he tries to make coexist on the canvas.

Frédéric Di Martino does not take half measures. When it comes out of the fairly modest-sized picture format, it is to jubilantly produce murals, frescoes against a day or night background, which punctuate the art space with a series of plastic "flashes of brilliance". .

These monumental paintings allow him to establish another relationship with the medium, a change of scale, gestures and tools and to play both the alternation and the fusion of very colorful universes in works of an ephemeral character, carried out depending on the location.

If the exhibition is called The Heritage of My Father, it is because the artist wishes to establish a connection between his pictorial universe and the different sources from which he was nourished.

The first painted images that the artist observed as a child are those of Mr. Di Martino senior, an amateur artist, some of which are exhibited in the central part of the second floor. A zebra, a giraffe, a Cowboy and a Goldorak come together through the gouaches and drawings made from 1965 to 1979, revealing the artist's first cultural references.