Fabien Perani

Fabien Perani lives and works in Marseille (FR)

As strange as they are familiar, Fabien Perani’s paintings bring together the near and the far within a pictorial unity that expresses a state of never quite being both in one’s place and in the right place. The artist’s gesture, which he describes as “poor and synthetic,” ironically confronts natural and artificial elements that are as opposed as they are complementary: stalactites with flowers, road signs in a landscape, flames against bubbles, housing developments nestled between mountains, ponds in the middle of the road, micro and macro views. The combination of these components flattens perspective to form a single improbable scene, expanding space beyond what is possible and creating an aesthetic of the “non-place.” This spatial unity does not aim to establish new norms, boundaries or codes. Instead, Fabien Perani attempts to configure a space born from intersection, fragile and subject to change, as opposed to the industrial knowledge and techniques he employs, which seem permanent and solid.

One may see in his work the duality between nature and culture as that between the conscious and the unconscious, from the very beginning of the pictorial act: “I paint with a kind of shaky, poor figuration in order to show the richness of what escapes me and the poverty of what I produce.” Certain figures such as pylons, paths and partitioned territories, roads and traffic signs refer to the post-industrial era and align with a conscious act tied to a desire to master the world and the gesture. On the other hand, the eruptive forms, almost fantastical exaggerations of realistic details, belong to the arbitrary and liberating domain of an unconscious that resists the simplifying and codifying vision that fragments the world.

While the artist disrupts our spatial representations, he also plays with our perception of time through pictorial borrowing. The mountains in his Japanese-inspired landscapes also echo abstract expressionism. This unexpected distribution of elements and styles may be read as a fragmentation of time, leaving shifting traces of a history that is difficult to dislodge. How can one revisit landscapes in painting when art history has already done so? Is it possible to free oneself from influences and be even slightly innovative? Fabien Perani’s answer is clear: “It’s complicated to find a form of freedom in gesture when you know it’s distorted by your knowledge of art history. I fake the freedom of gesture.”

To feign, simulate, scheme, play the naïf or even the fool is, for him, a way to express our condition as beings scattered through time and space.

- Text by Elsa Roussel