Les plaisirs de la table II, 1997

Dominique Appia  

Dominique Appia was born in Geneva in 1926, of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, in an environment of good bourgeoisie. He is part of a family where artistic concerns were essential. His great-uncle, Adolphe Appia, was a great theorist of theatrical direction at the end of the 19th century. After a childhood that he describes as difficult, he finished his compulsory education at 12 years old. Between the ages of 20 and 25, he worked in different fields: from hotel hunter to taxi driver, he was introduced to photographic retouching and printing and then persevered, for 15 years, as a designer in an architect's office. or he is confronted with precision drawings and respect for proportions. He began his artistic career at the age of 40 as a true autodidact3. His favorite themes are very varied: cities, the roofs of Geneva, the harbor, the Salève, the Saint-Pierre cathedral in Geneva, the Geneva water jet as well as trains, stations, fireplaces, instruments. music to name a few. His works are most often painted in acrylics and very structured. They suggest dreamlike, unusual and strange worlds. They sometimes refer to the history of art: the Renaissance and surrealism. Dominique Appia is the author of numerous wall decorations in public and private buildings and, in particular, the ceiling of the Victoria Hall in Geneva. He also produced several posters, notably in 1979, for the traveling exhibition Le temps des gares4 which won him the Grand Prix for French Poster. He is involved, as an illustrator, to promote humanitarian, cultural or environmental causes. He created, among other things, a poster for a French association for the protection of the environment, which depicts Noah's ark in the form of a ship without masts or sails filled with exuberant vegetation and, in 1985, the poster of the exhibition The Multiplied Face of the World: Four Centuries of Ethnography in Geneva for the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève. In 1982, he took part in the Geneva democratic debate, by producing a poster on the occasion of the vote on the project to destroy the Promenade de l'Observatoire in Geneva3.