Gauloises, 2025

Pierre-François Grimaldi   Emerging artists

Born in 1969 Pierre-François Grimaldi lives and works in Paris. His work is constructed and begins with a search for material: posters from the 1930s to 1950s still present in the stations of the Paris metro. It is during station renovations that the artist, like an archaeologist, traces the past and appropriates these posters. He creates paper compositions that he maroufles on canvas to give them another sense of reading, in a permanent search for aesthetics. These compositions are at the same time abstract, modern, strong, colorful and singular. In a society where the image is omnipresent and our urban landscape is saturated with it, the artist will seek the forgotten vestiges of the premises of our mass consumption. Modernity prevails over nostalgia.

Pierre-François Grimaldi invents a language. He creates compositions dictated by his sensitivity showing the evolution of our society and an ever present excessive consumption, a contemporary poetry with old faces and codes.

It was by unearthing old advertising posters from the 1930s to 1970s during the renovations of the Paris Metro that Pierre-François Grimaldi found his medium. His compositions are inspired by recovered posters. Memory of History, these strips of bare and weakened paper bear witness to their time, whether through their subject (politics, advertising, information) and through their graphic, typographical content and the palette of colors used. Pierre-François Grimaldi collects them, rediscovers them and renovates them in his studio. Following in the footsteps of the New Realists (Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains), his work joins the art of assembling and accumulating elements borrowed from daily reality but belonging here to the past.

For twenty years, he has been using the talent of period poster artists (Benjamin Rabier, Bernard Vilmot, etc.) to recreate the worlds of yesteryear, mixing modernity and the past with works steeped in history. These compositions are very abstract with figurative posters, he knows how to play on the different formats often presented under Plexiglas formwork but also bare, putting the viewer directly in contact with the material. Made up of almost lithographic posters, the volume of his works emerges through the successive pasted layers of the torn posters.

The works of Pierre-François Grimaldi, a confirmed artist, have aroused great enthusiasm at contemporary art fairs, with collectors, whether in Paris or London, as well as during the exhibitions he has been able to produce during his twenty years. years of an artist's life.