Habiter demain Rose #001, 2023

Patrick Santoni  

Patrick Santoni lives and works in the Anjou region. His inspiration comes from what he perceives as the incoherence of the world in which he lives.

After studies from the Beaux-Arts, architecture section, he started his artistic work in the early 80s. Influenced by the thematic and graphic freedom of Street Art, La Figuration Libre and Figuration Narrative, he nevertheless claims a classical technical approach (glazing, sfumato, chiaroscuro), the latter allowing him to distance himself from his subjectivity and, beyond that, any possibility of affect. This figurative and technical handling aims at extracting a disturbing strangeness from the point of reversal of reality and to prompt a questioning of the spectator.

In the early 2000s, his "Ringed Birds" series inaugurated a pictorial form inspired by Pop Art. He captured the formalism of labels and posters and designed canvases that he organised like posters with provocative slogans. In 2010, he returns to his fundamentals: landscapes and architecture are the nodal elements through which he will henceforth question existence. The works in the "Horizons", "Piscines" and "Réparations" series have followed one another since then to the rhythm of writing the world and history, each one offering an aesthetic variation in the service of the subject.

From architecture, he draws conceptual methods and a plastic rigour that he applies to the composition of his works. From landscape, he makes his narrative material. But, grasping from the outset the challenge of multimedia, he uses images from all media, from television and photographic imagery to Google Maps, which he manipulates digitally before transcribing them onto the canvas. Exile, uprooting, abandonment, ruins, the invading maquis, the dust of summer, the legacy of his Corsican origins, punctuate his images.

His visuals, both simple and complex, present a universe whose aesthetic illusion only precipitates us into the oceanic abyss that our era writes.

The juxtaposition of sharp and blurred images, the concatenation of planes, the organisation of metonymic elements blur the logic of perception.

The frontier between real and reality becomes literal and brings into existence a universe on the border of uchronia, where hope collides with a dull world, ordered by the discipline of aesthetics from which meaning and reality escape.

His works reflect - almost as ananamorphosis - the noisy and uncertain silence of our time, but also the particular relationship of Man to the landscape.

The artist wishes to question his contemporaries about their paradoxes, their choices for the future.

Some of his works are part of numerous private collections in the United States and Europe. One of them, "Man behind the mask", has been part of the TAFM (Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan) since 2004.