Mémoire, 2025
Urban Art Fair 2026

César Malfi  

Noted for his monumental frescoes that blend classical and naive styles, César Malfi occupies an undisputed place on the Côte d'Azur art scene. A rising star of street art, hailing from the world of graffiti, the self-taught artist offers a unique interpretation of ancient art, combining the past and modernity, for creations with a timeless appeal.

“To remember antiquity is to recall the virtuosity of our elders, their invention of the canons of beauty through their technical prowess.”

César set out to spread this classical cultural heritage and share it. Following a graffiti accident, he was struck by another shock, this time an aesthetic one, upon discovering Michelangelo's David, which he had admired in Florence as a child. Fascinated by the plastic beauty of the body, the harmony of proportions, and the virtuosity of sculpted work, César then set out to learn to draw, but also to observe, so that one day he could create in his turn.

For César, the beauty of classical art "shows what humanity is capable of," creating rather than destroying. Using the tool of street art, the spray can, he invites gods and heroes into the heart of the city. Masterpieces of yesterday, preserved in museums, escape into the streets under his spray, offering themselves to all to see. With a humanist spirit, the young artist seeks to offer Beauty to his contemporaries.

Through this spatio-temporal transfer, César Malfi reconciles scholarly art and popular art in a desire to question our relationship to culture and the place of art in the city.

If Dali and Magritte embody tutelary figures for César, it is nevertheless in Fernand Léger and his naive figures that he rediscovers the candor of his childhood. In a syncretic impulse, he then decides to affix, unite, merge the two classical and modern aesthetics to break the codes as much as to complete the forms. The sculpted face fragments, doubles, interrupts itself to extend into a naive and spontaneous outline.

Inspired by a close family relationship, he also borrows subliminally from the School of Nice: Martial Raysse for his diversion of the classics and the confrontation of saturated colors, Bernar Venet for the balance and elegance in his gigantism and finally Ben for the freedom of his artistic gesture, his interactivity with the public and his vision of a total art.

If azure blue is primarily used in his works, it is as much for its reference to the Mediterranean context as for its plastic qualities of calm, serenity and confidence.

By dividing his composition into geometric shapes, César seeks to better structure it. Like patches that stick to the surface of the wall, each polygon isolates and enhances a detail of the work in a different block of color. The work thus acquires greater readability but also its singularity. To the shades of gray of these marbled models, César adds a palette of complementary colors in a constant search for balance.

Keen to give meaning to their presence, César questions the placement of his works: "What does the place tell me? What does it tell others? How am I going to make it speak through the work?" Thus, Ernest Pignon-Ernest becomes his supreme reference, which has allowed him to rethink his work in the city by making a "classical gesture in the public space." In his carefully considered, contextual and memorial work, César "discovers the virtuosity of the technique and the poetry he puts into his works." Two essential conditions for the creation of a work according to César Malfi's personal philosophy.