Born in 1969, Pierre-François Grimaldi lives and works in Paris. His work is built upon and begins with a search for materials: posters from the 1930s to 1950s still found in Parisian metro stations. It is during station renovations that the artist, like an archaeologist, sets out to trace the past and appropriates these posters. He creates paper compositions which he then mounts on canvas to give them a new meaning, in a constant pursuit of aesthetics. These compositions are at once abstract, modern, powerful, colorful, and unique. In a society where images are omnipresent and our urban landscape is saturated with them, the artist seeks out the forgotten vestiges of the beginnings of our mass consumption. Modernity triumphs over nostalgia.
A contemporary poetry with ancient faces and codes.
Pierre-François Grimaldi invents a language. He creates compositions dictated by his sensibility, reflecting the evolution of our society and its ever-present excessive consumption.
Pierre-François Grimaldi, Urban Nostalgia
It was while unearthing old advertising posters from the 1930s to the 1970s during renovations of the Paris Metro that Pierre-François Grimaldi found his medium. His compositions are inspired by the posters he recovers. Historical artifacts, these stripped-down and fragile pieces of paper bear witness to their time, whether through their subject matter (political, advertising, informational) or through their graphic and typographic content and the color palette used. Pierre-François Grimaldi collects, rediscovers, and restores them in his studio. Following in the footsteps of the New Realists (Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains), his work embraces the art of assemblage and the accumulation of elements borrowed from everyday reality, but belonging here to the past.
Works steeped in history
For twenty years, he has drawn on the talent of poster artists of the era (Benjamin Rabier, Bernard Vilmot, etc.) to recreate bygone worlds, blending modernity and the past. These compositions are highly abstract, incorporating figurative posters. He skillfully plays with different formats, often presented under plexiglass frames but also sometimes left unadorned, directly engaging the viewer with the material. Composed of almost lithographic posters, the volume of his works emerges from the successive layers of torn posters.
Pierre-François Grimaldi, an established artist
Pierre-François Grimaldi's works have generated considerable enthusiasm at contemporary art fairs, among collectors in Paris and London, and at the exhibitions he has held throughout his twenty-year career as an artist.
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