A key artist at the gallery, René Galassi opens the doors of his studio in Nice, the city that has inspired him for many years, from the deep blue of the Mediterranean to the warm colours of the old town.
Hello René, can you introduce yourself ?
Hello, my name is René Galassi, I am a visual artist. I live and work in Nice. I come from the world of paper. More than 30 years ago, I joined a printmaking studio, working as an intaglio printer, where I printed a large number of works by various painters (recognised or otherwise in the region). After 4 or 5 years, I moved to the other side and began creating my own prints. They met with success quickly, and I therefore embarked on a career as a visual artist..
How do you express yourself as an artist ?
All of my work revolves around printmaking, even if that connection is not always directly visible. If I create original works, it is thanks to and through paper and printmaking. Had I not been a printmaker, I could never have produced the works I create today, because when you print an engraving, you choose the format of the image, but there are always offcuts of paper left over, strips, more specifically. The paper used in printmaking is a paper I love, called rag paper, made by hand. I kept all these offcuts for years, never throwing them away, without knowing that one day I would reuse them. It was while printing rope imprints onto paper that I had the idea of using them in a different way. I now use them perpendicular to a support, to create my current body of work, the Calicots et Pigments series.
Alongside my printmaking, I have always worked with pigment. For more than 15 years, I sought to fix pigment without altering its nature. To do so, I focused my works on colours that are purely primary colours (namely red, yellow, and blue). I then concentrated on rendering the same intensity of light in my works as one sees in pure pigments. This is not something you buy off the shelf, it is a recipe you make yourself. When you are an intaglio printer, you spend the entire day in front of the plate printing works, so you observe material and colour closely. In the evening, when you close your eyes, you see the impression of colours again, like a photograph. It was therefore important to me to work with colour and to have it present in my works..
What is your creative process?
I have periods of several months during which, every morning, like a musician practising their scales, I produce dozens and dozens of sketches. I therefore spend an hour to an hour and a half every day drawing sketches. I then select a few of them. And for me, that is truly where creation lies.
Then, once I have determined the design I am going to create, it becomes a matter of artistic craftsmanship, creativity is truly at the foundation. So I prepare the support, as it does not exist commercially. I therefore construct a structure in either wood or paper, depending on the size of the piece.
I then reproduce the small drawing, which is 2-3 cm tall and 1.5 cm wide, onto a considerably larger format. Already the scale changes, and sometimes in changing scale, it no longer works, as what is small is not necessarily achievable in large. All painters know this. If my sketch works, I prepare my strips of paper and position them on my canvas, I glue them down, I sand the work or not depending on the effect I wish to achieve. Finally I paint. This can take a very long time, there is a great deal of drying time involved. It can last several days, the painting in my works is a very complex process. Many reworkings are therefore necessary. But once this stage is complete, the work is finished.
I therefore sometimes work on several paintings at the same time, as when one work is drying, I can work on another. A single work, from the time of conceiving it to completing it, takes a minimum of three weeks.
What do you seek to represent in your works?
Little by little, I felt myself drawn towards this desire to represent precise things, even my imprints are very carefully determined in advance. I like to get to the essence of things, including in creation. These are rope imprints, or geometric forms. I have reached the point I wanted to reach. I am not like that in my mind, but it is the direction I wish to take, that of a clearly defined structure.
In fact, I remember that as a child, I had a tendency to destroy all the drawings I made, so in a way, I am trying to escape from the chaos that is present in my everyday life, and to arrive at something very refined in my works. What interests me is creating beautiful things. I am in search of beauty, regardless of those who believe that art is not there to represent it. I am very sensitive to harmony in the universe. There is a mathematical rule called the Fibonacci sequence. It is the closest approximation of the golden ratio, which is present everywhere in nature. Beauty can be explained through mathematics, and somewhere along the way, without knowing it, I have aligned myself with this sequence.
What are your inspirations ?
At the beginning I was very drawn to texture. One might mention Antoni Tàpies, for example. Perhaps I tried to work a little like him at first, but I did not succeed. In a way, he went as far as one could go in that kind of experimentation. So I left that world to move towards a direction that suited me better. I therefore think I am influenced by a number of painters, but without always knowing it or being able to name them. There is for example Sol LeWitt, an artist I am very fond of. When I discovered him, I was making work that came close to what he was doing, or at least that could have existed in a similar world. So little by little I discover artists who express the same things as me, which is pleasing, but at the same time dangerous, because what interests me is creating things that are personal to me. For example, I love primary colours, and the artist most widely known for his use of primary colours is Mondrian. People have therefore often told me that I draw inspiration from Mondrian’s colours, but in fact, I simply love the values of black and white, and I love primary colours.
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