One of the gallery's key artists, René Galassi opens the doors of his studio in Nice, a city that has inspired him for many years, from the deep blue of the Mediterranean to the warm colors of the old town.
Hello René, would you like to introduce yourself?
Hello, my name is René Galassi, I'm a visual artist. I live and work in Nice. I come from the world of paper. More than 30 years ago, I joined a paper engraving art studio as an intaglio printer, where I printed a large number of works by various painters (both well-known and unknown in the region). After 4/5 years, I went over to the other side and created my own engravings. They quickly became a success, so I started working as a visual artist.
How do you express yourself as an artist?
All my work revolves around engraving, even if there isn't necessarily a direct visible link. If I make original works, it's thanks to and through paper and engraving. If I hadn't been an engraver, I'd never have been able to create the works I do now, because when you print an engraving, you choose the format of the image, but you're always left with scraps of paper, more specifically strips.
The paper used in engraving is a paper I love, called rag paper, made by hand. I've kept all these scraps of paper for years, never throwing them away, never knowing that one day I'd use them again. It was while printing rope marks on paper that I got the idea of using them, in a roundabout way.
I now use them perpendicular to a support, to create my current work, the Calicots et pigments series.
In parallel with my engraving, I've always worked with pigment. For over 15 years, I've sought to fix pigment without denaturing it. To do this, I focused my work on colors that are only primary colors (namely red, yellow and blue). Then I concentrated on restoring the same intensity of light in my work as when you see pure pigments. It's not something you buy off the shelf. It's a kitchen that you make. When you're a stamper, you're in front of the plate printing works all day long, so you observe the material and the color. In the evening, when you close your eyes, you see the colors again. It's like a photograph. So for me, it was important to work with color and for it to be present in my work.
What is your creative process?
I have periods lasting several months, during which every morning, like a musician practicing his scales, I'll make dozens and dozens of sketches. So I'll spend an hour or hour and a half every day drawing sketches. I'll select a few. And for me, that's really where the creation comes in.
Then, once I've decided on the design I'm going to make, it becomes arts and crafts.
So I prepare the support, because it's not commercially available. So I make a structure out of either wood or paper. Depending on the size of the painting.
Then I reproduce the small drawing, which is 2.3 cm high and 1.5 cm wide, on a much larger format. Already you're changing scale, and sometimes changing scale doesn't work anymore, because what's small isn't necessarily feasible in large. Every painter knows this.
If my sketch works, I prepare my strips of paper, position them on my board, glue them, sand the work, or not, depending on the effect I want to achieve.
Finally, I paint. This can take a long time, as there's a lot of drying time. It can take several days, because the painting in my work is very complex. So I have to do a lot of retouching. But once this stage is over, the work is finished.
I sometimes do several paintings at the same time, because when one work is drying, I can intervene on another. It takes a minimum of 3 weeks to complete a work, from the moment it's conceived to the moment it's finished.
What do you seek to represent in yOur artworks?
Slowly, I felt myself slipping into this desire to represent strict things, even my prints are very determined in advance. I like to go straight to the point, even when creating. These are rope prints, or geometric shapes. I've reached the point where I want to go. I'm not like that in my head, but that's the direction I want to go in, with a definite structure.
In fact, I remember that as a child, I tended to destroy all the drawings I made, so somewhere along the line, I'm trying to get away from the chaos that's present in my everyday life, and come up with something very finalized in my works.
What interests me is making beautiful things. I'm in search of beauty, despite those who think that art isn't there to represent it. I'm very sensitive to harmony in the universe. There's a mathematical rule called the Fibonacci sequence. It's the best approximation to the golden ratio, which is present everywhere in nature. Beauty can be explained mathematically, and somewhere along the line, without realizing it, I joined the Fibonacci sequence.
What are your sources of inspiration?
In the beginning, I was very sensitive to materials. Antoni Tapies, for example. Maybe I tried to do something like him at first, but I didn't succeed. Somewhere along the line, he went as far as he could in his experimentation. So I left that universe to go into a movement that suited me better. So I think I'm influenced by a certain number of painters, but I don't always know or name them. There's Sol LeWitt, for example, an artist I really like. When I discovered him, I was doing work that was close to what he was doing, or at least that could have been in a similar universe. So as time goes by, I discover artists who express the same thing as me, which is nice, but at the same time dangerous. Because what interests me is making things that are personal to me. For example, I love primary colors, and the artist who is best known for his use of primary colors is Mondrian. So I've often been told that I'm inspired by Mondrian's colors, but in fact I like the values of black and white, I like primary colors.
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