Frédéric Fenoll

Paris 1959 Birth. Amiens 1975-1978.

At 16, a classmate introduced him to the existence of art: a landscape where a cow grazes peacefully. Shortly afterwards, reading during chemistry class What for? of Michel Ragon causes his dismissal from high school. Apprentice ceramist, he follows evening classes at the Beaux-Arts in Amiens.

Nice 1979-1995

Very quickly, he wanted to get out of the narrow framework of ceramics. Exasperated, he throws his creations, barely dry, against a wall.

The result fascinates him ... Something has been added to the original form. At 19, showing the result of his “anger”, an artist from the Calibre33 Is it art? tells him that he is an artist and that what he produces is a work of art.

Now an artist, he begins to paint and exhibit his canvases. Ben notices his productions and places them under the sign of “Free Figuration”. Assistant to Ben for 3 years, he understands that it is not his production, but his attitude towards it, which is art. Many galleries host his work, the Galerie Macé in Cannes, Daan Gallery in Amsterdam, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Nice and the Villa Arson as well as the Museums of Toulon, Nantes and Bologna. Canvases from this period can be found at the Saint-Etienne Museum, at the MAMAC in Nice and at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Bologna.

“When attitudes become forms”, it happens that forms become attitudes: Impressionism is an attitude towards the world and in the hands of Frédéric Fenoll it becomes a tool that can be used to create another form.

Paris 1995-2018

In 1995, back in Paris, he discovered the polyhedron. We can say that any form is a polyhedron, more or less regular: a cube, a car, a cloud, Rodin's thinker ... With polyhedra, all forms are present, potentially, virtually. Finally freed from form or rather from any formal research, all that remains is to represent the void or the infinite ... Sculptures, very real, in aluminum or pvc, will be exhibited in galleries, like those of Bob Benamou or that of Michel Rein in Paris, will join private collections or FRACs. The virtual sculptures will be presented on computer and from 1998 on the internet.

The birth of the web will reveal to him and bring him a continuous flow of images and texts, mixing news, history, art, debates ... Films (short and medium-length films) will thus be born, linking a painting by Caravaggio to a pornographic image, an African totem with the body of the artist, generating a decoded flow of the world, a concept dear to Deleuze and Guattari. These films are shown at experimental film and video festivals. capable of representing all the threads of the Universe ... The work, the works of FF are to be seen and reviewed constantly, taking into account this unique and multidimensional trajectory!

February 2019, Philippe Jais.