Ici on s'aime Bleu 1 Aluminium, 2025

JPHI  

Jean-Philippe Desfarges

It is by populating the void with his metal wire creations that Jphi gave birth to his universe. The material inhabits and structures the space with fantasy and lightness and offers by building it, a sculptural and poetic vision of the world.

Ex Nihilo, characters and objects appear as a reflection of the real and familiar world around us. We recognize them, we come across them on a daily basis: they are silhouettes, portraits or profiles sculpted in postures and formats dictated by reverie and the artist's desire. They are sometimes pensive, mischievous, contemplative, rebellious,... In wire, aluminum or copper, Jphi also shapes, always with poetry, animals and plants of our world.

He also gives life to creatures inspired by tales and mythology (series of "Minotaurs", "The Horse who dreamed of being a unicorn"...). Sculptures with strange and surprising shapes that testify to Jphi's taste for the fantastic and his strong attachment to tolerance and difference (the "Tripod" series, multi-head bust, etc.). It is the “other" that he defends, the original and singular being, eccentric and sometimes deformed, and to whom he allows to exist alongside our models of normality.

These are two worlds that coexist harmoniously in Jphi's work: A mirror of reality and the imagination of another world.
Always with a palpable sensitivity that is sometimes reflected in the angles or curves given to the metallic material twisted and domesticated by the artist.
Her creations, born from a thread that is most often thin and light, are aerial, sometimes mobile, and also speak of the fragility and transience of life.

They speak to the heart of a child, to the soul of the poet, to the mind of the curious, to everyone's conscience and imagination. With delicacy, humor, mischief and sometimes anger.
And finally, to keep the lasting written mark of these emotions that govern us, Jphi offers statements and messages sculpted, framed or arranged in thin steel cubes. An artistic and committed gesture to capture and magnify the verb and an elegant response to the ephemeral of words in the age of new technologies.
Inspired very early on by aboriginal art, an art of origins, sensitive, colorful and poetic, JPhi began with painting. With as another leaven for its wire-of-ferist art, the iconography and the unique graphic style of Keith Haring.

Trained as an electrician, a profession that he put to the service of the cinema, it is very naturally that JPhi became an accomplice of the wire. He has been twisting it skillfully for 20 years armed with his magic pliers, the famous Leatherman of film sets. Where fiction rubs shoulders with reality, as in his practice of sculpture.