Sema-Phoros, 2023

Jean-Paul Agosti   Emerging artists

Jean-Paul Agosti has always been fascinated by nature . Born in Paris in 1948, eldest son of Paul and Jeanne Facchetti (photographer and gallery owner), he manifested his vocation as a painter very early and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1965. At the time, his friends were the designer Philippe Stark, the painters Gérard Garouste , Alekos Fassianos , Jean Pierre Pincemin etc.

It was in the 1970s that Agosti really entered into painting. What interests him above all is the symbolism of the garden , the problems of control and architecture of space that this poses.

In 1976 he moved to Gif-sur-Yvette in the abandoned grounds of an old abbey where there was a very beautiful garden which he began to paint. At that time he learned the technique of watercolor . The unusual vision he gives of the garden allows us to guess beyond the simplicity of appearances the complexity of a world to be grasped: there are in the same space, for those who know how to see, different levels of reality to discover.

The meeting with the Polish mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot and the discovery of fractal thinking were decisive for Agosti in his personal vision: he realized that scientists formalize with their instruments what he intuitively returns in his work. The artist will then create a hyperbolic space where polychrome (or monochrome ) images will appear at different scales. In this space-time and this new perspective, he constantly changes scales, postures and techniques to better reflect a tree structure. For Agosti there is the baroque idea of the mise en abyss of the image and the ordering of an original chaos. The figure of the "Tree", as a structure and as a symbol, is omnipresent in his work.