CharlElie Couture & Jean Marc Calvet “Obsession”
Chelsea 27 (Artemisia Gallery, Azart Gallery and MZ Urban Art)
This event has ended.
Two Frenchmen, worlds apart connected by chance via the internet. They developed a friendship and mutual respect for each other’s work. Obsession presents the two artists work side by side.
CharlElie was born in Nancy , France in 1956, major graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, CharlElie is a multidisciplinary artist, seeking interconnections between different forms of expression such as photography, music, sculpture and painting.
The success of his poetic-rock-blues music albums has not stopped him from continuing his exploration in painting, sculpture and photography. Since his first individual exhibit in a gallery (1978), CharlElie exhibited his work in Europe and now in New York, where he settled in 2004. His work can be found in private collections around the world.
His current painting, “photo-graff” and sculpture work is now mostly focused on the “perspective of the inner lines”, which is first and foremost a reflection about human beings and the different layers of the personality. The formal aspect of his expression is a very coded urban mix, combining photo and painting. For thirty years, CharlElie has accumulated an incredible amount of different works. Great artists often challenge the complacent truth; a life trajectory crosses periods of shadow and light. Between the glass walls of the Manhattan buildings and the rumbling heart of a society in permanent RE-construction, CharlElie’s path has shown itself to be a search for the absolute of Art.
Jean Marc Calvet is a self-taught artist, an outsider in every spirit of the word. His dramatic and desperate life until the age of 47 was full of destructive, personal demons. It came to a tumultuous low point when he decided to take his own life. However instead of death he found art. His salvation came from realizing instead of allowing the monsters in his mind to wreak havoc on him personally, he was able to release them and imprison them in his paintings.
When you see a Calvet painting for the first time, it is easy to be seduced by the vibrant colors, the simple outline motifs and the pulsing energy that powers out of the canvas. It is only when you start to study the extraordinarily intricate details that you realize that there are much darker forces driving the creative engine. It is possible to get a glimpse of the dark depths of his soul from the safety of the other side of the canvas, a place where Calvet also stands today, thanks to the grace of redemption that he finds in his art.
A feature documentary film “Calvet” produced by British director Dominic Allan recreates Calvet’s tortuous journey to his life today. Calvet also had a major retrospective of his work at the MDC Museum of Art and Design in the Freedom Tower Miami in 2012. He has participated in several art biennials and had numerous solo exhibitions in galleries in Europe, Central and South America and the United States. His work is held in many private collections worldwide.
Media
Schedule
from October 30, 2014 to November 29, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-10-30 from 18:00 to 20:00