User:Blast Gallery

Julien Porisse

Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England 4th April 1962 Lives in Cannes (France) and São Paulo (Brazil) Studied Fine Art : Leicester Polytechnic from 1981- 1882 Foundation Course. 1982-1984 B.A. fine Art. École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in September 1984 in the Atelier of Pierre Carron. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_nationale_supérieure_des_Beaux-Arts. Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris 2009 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_de_la_Grande_Chaumière

Early life :

His father Julien Jules Porisse (1927-2013) was a French painter of "L'École de Paris" and his mother Anne Corcoran Porisse (1929-1989) was an Irish watercolourist. Living at 53-55 Rue du Chevalier de la Barre, Paris, where Julien's father had his atelier Gallery (1966-1995). Julien went to Grace Dieu Manor and later to Ratcliffe College in Leicestershire, England from 1971-1981. John Satterswaithe was Julien's art teacher for a decade in England.

Art College :

Studying Fine Art at Leicester Polytechnic (De Montford University) from 1981-1983 doing a foundation year followed by a BA course. In September 1983 he passed the entry examination to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. Pierre Carron was his alledged tutor and head of the atelier where he stayed for one year.

Art :

In 2008 Julien Porisse began painting large format abstracts. In May 2009 he was shown at the SP-Arte art fair with Parisian Gallery "Sycomore Art", renamed Galerie White Projects. In December 2014 he had his first solo exhibition in São Paulo at the Galeria Sergio Caribé " Construçoes Aleatorias " http://www.institutopinheiro.org.br/eventos/exposicao-construcoes-aleatorias/#.VNvTo4Y3qrV

In 2016 he had his second solo show in Brazil at the Galeria Rabieh in Sāo Paulo, Brazil.

http://www.galeriarabieh.com.br/exposicao.php?expo=COR--FORMA--LUZ

Group Exhibitions :

2016 Salon d'Automne, Paris, France

2014 Salon d'Automne, Paris, France

2014 Dublin Biennal, Dublin, Ireland

2013 Art en Capital, Paris, France

2013 IX Biennale di Firenze, Italy

2013 Salon d'Automne, Paris, France

2013 ArtRio, Galeria Espaço Eliana Benchimol, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2013 "Atlantico Contemporaneo", Galeria Espaço Eliana Benchimol, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2013 ArtParis, Galerie W Landau, Paris, France

2011 VIII Biennale di Firenze, Italy

2011 SNBA Art en Capital, Paris, France

2011 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, France

2011 B.W.A.C. Tales of Breukelen, New York, USA

2010 SP-ARTE, Sycomore Art Paris, São Paulo, Brazil

2009 VII Biennale di Firenze, Italy

2009 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, France

2009 SP-ARTE Sycomore Art Paris, São Paulo, Brazil

1990 Art Attack, Paris France

1986 Galerie 51, Paris France

1982 Kimberlin Library, Leicester, UK

1981 Atelier 53, Paris, France

1980 Galerie du Moulin de la Galette, Paris, France

1979 Galerie du Moulin de la Galette, Paris, France

1978 Atelier 53, Paris, France

1977 Atelier 53, Paris, France

Expositions Individuelles :

2016 "Cor, Forma, Luz", Galeria Rabieh, São Paulo, Brazil

2014 "Construçoes Aleàtorias", Galeria Sergio Caribé, São Paulo, Brazil

2014 "Constructions Aléatoires, Blast-Matignon Gallery, Paris, France

2012 "Spirit Diggers", Blast Gallery, Paris, France

2012 Banco do Brasil, New York, USA

2012 Blast Gallery, "Spirit Diggers", Paris, France

2011 Banco do Brasil, New York, USA

+ Info

2011 Magnus-Laurentius-Medices - Biennale Internazionale Dell'Arte Contemporanea Città Di Firenze, Italy

2010 Médaille d'Or de L'année 2011 "Wheat 5"- Fédération de la Culture Française, France

Texts :

COLOUR, FORM, LIGHT

The Artistic Language of JULIEN PORISSE

In the seminal work by Anton Ehrenzwieg, a lecturer in art at Goldsmiths College, London, The Hidden Order of Art  (1967) he describes the dynamic mental processes which an artist undergoes in the creative act and the role the unconscious mind plays in this process. This is especially true in the process of creating abstract works such as those created by the artist Julien Porisse. This creative process often results in the development of a new visual language and often requires a new means of interpreting that visual language in order for it to be fully understood and appreciated. This new language often drawn only from the artist’s imagination and consisting of simply symbols, concrete forms and colours is frequently seen as mediocre or childlike in execution and the representations facile or awkward merely because they do not tell a story [iconography] that the viewer can easily understand.

The  German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, addresses the issue of viewer response to an artwork in his 1908 essay Abstraction and Empathy. For example, the viewer response when looking at a Cezanne still- life painting would be the emotion of empathy because of the familiar objects within the composition… images already in their memories and experiences of an apple and an orange. Conversely, the viewer may experience a feeling of chaos when faced with abstraction…simple geometric forms of lines, circles and intersecting planes with no such familiar memories or emotions to refer to and no story to tell. This is a dilemma many abstract painters face and they must go within themselves to overcome. For Worringer abstraction is the first real expression of artistic will.

Artistic will defines the practice of Julien Porisse. His works are a visual autobiography culminating in the concrete forms and luminous surfaces  which inhabit his current paintings, collages and constructions. But even what may seem as the simplest work of art to some has its complexity, however bare its construction may appear on superficial scrutiny. So, it is fascinating to examine what is the hidden order of art in Porisse’s abstract works and how he reconciles the chaos of abstraction bringing order to the seeming disorder. For Porisse. ‘there is nothing worse than common abstraction …paint here and colours there…no soul, no reason, empty…sometimes I think a single colour is amazing or a Rothko that causes you to imagine the story.

Julien Porisse began his early life as a young figurative painter, the son of an accomplished French painter and Irish mother living in Montmarte, Paris. He was trained formally both in France and England and his later years have been spent travelling between Paris and his second home in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the ensuing time he has  developed his strong yet contemplative geometric style of painting influenced by his multicultural experiences and surroundings. One may consider his style falls somewhere between the Neo-Concrete Movement  popular in Brazil between 1959-61 with Grupo Frente in Rio de Janiero and artists such as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica members…it was popular because of its non-political message of rationalism which does not connote meaning outside of what it is…and the Lyrical Abstraction of France in the sense of a lyrical style moving away from the Cubist and Surrealist movements which preceded it and away from totally geometric or cold abstraction and towards the lessons learned from Kandinsky, where abstraction represented an opening to personal expression.

Porisse says, ‘I am influenced firstly by my surroundings. This sets the colours and luminousity of my work. For instance in Paris my colours are more earthy, darker, not as luminous but more in contrasts and clashes, oppositions instead of complementary. Then, there is subconscious imagery. Anything from derelict buidings to a cluster of palm trees. These are immediate influences. The secondary influences come from art I have seen and that trigger something. Pierre Soulages and the reflection of light in his canvases or looking at a Jasper Johns flag painting and finding his hidden letters that emerge from under the wax and paint not fully revealed. Let’s say I am a post – concretist with a French touch.

However, even though an admirer of many contemporary artists and masters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh he states ‘the past must be avoided but the influences are always there so maybe just renewed is a better way of looking at it. The object, the subject, the style do they matter anymore? Is painting dead?’ Well, Porisse’s paintings and collages are certainly not dead and in his current work what matters is the paint, the tactile surface, how it is applied and how it speaks to him through texture, light and confrontation of forms. Light and colour are central to his work and perhaps the importance of light in his work can be partially explained by the experience he had as a young boy of 6 when he had an accident on a farm in Ireland and lost the vision in his left eye. When 12 years old the right eye began to fail as well and for six months in 1974 he was blind He could not go out of doors because the light was too strong and he had to be gradually brought back into the light. This trauma manifests itself in his work as targets in concentric circles charged with the vibrant colours of his palette. Sonia Delaunay, who is also an inspiration for  Porisse, called her forms in Orphist works, electric prisms’ from the light beams of Parisian lamps. Orphists aimed to dispense with recognizable subject matter and to rely on form and colour to communicate meaning a lesson Porisse has taken to heart.

Today Porisse’s eyesight is fine in his right eye, but his conflict with realism and abstraction does play with his mind. On the other hand this metamorphosis of an idea from reality to abstraction also invigorates his imagination and thus his expands the scope of his work. He usually begins without anything more that a general idea taken perhaps from a shocking incident or a beautiful vision of nature. He starts usually with one colour and always puts on no more than two or three areas ( as one would approach a realistic painting like the sky, the ground or the shade) then he does a structure for the work in dark grey, just like shadows for buildings, then adds curves, targets, and marks which have a particular significance to him..ie planes wings or fuselages which fascinate him…The background is the last things he paints sometimes leaving marks and little smudges to give life to the work and move away from totally hard edge abstraction. This is the gesture of the artist, the physical mark that the creator of the work was there sensitively and intuitively adding his ‘signature’ of sorts.

The result of Porisse’s act of will is a body of work which is at the same time completely personal drawn from his life experiences and training and universal in its appeal as object of great beauty filled with compositional harmony and juxtapositions of colours

which take the eye on a journey in and out, around and about the canvas. There is ambiguity enough to engage every viewer on this journey to find out what his idea/image may have been. Can they discover the meaning in this visual language or does it really matter if they can enjoy it on another level without meaning? This is precisely what appreciation of abstract art and the work of Porisse requires, time to take a proper look. Don’t ask questions just enjoy the trip. Metamorphosis is the name of the game and the prize awarded to the winner is the living, often joyous harmony that radiates and resonates from the resulting picture.

Sandra Higgins

Independent Art Advisor and Curator

London, United Kingdom

August 2016

Julien Porisse’s life is one that renews itself constantly, experiences and multiple cultures keep him nourished, ambitions taken to levels of excellence in sport, business and painting. These different stages are each one lived to the fullest by his own personal talent and his family history. An Irish mother and a French father, Julien received a privileged education in England, from the finest schools where harsh discipline formed his personality built of determination but also of restraint and great sensibility. His athleticism pushed him towards high level sports, and in 1981 he started at Leicester Polytechnic where he did a foundation course and in 1984 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris for a degree. His father, a French artist, lived in Montmartre, where his atelier had American collectors and art dealers buying his works throughout his lifetime. These adventures he lived them alongside his twin brother, Liam, also a talented artist. An encounter with Brazil and most of all with Maria Angela, his wife who supports him with enthusiasm in all of his choices. After two years as a painter he started a business career, knowing that only a material and financial comfort would allow him later on to devote himself completely to painting. He opened with his two brothers in Paris a chain of Irish Pubs that have since become a success. He designed and decorated these pubs. He travelled back to Brazil to live both in Paris and in São Paulo. São Paulo is impressive, the colors, the climate, the size, the capacity of the city to renew itself unendingly, the chaotic geometry of it’s urbanism, the architecture that reveals such power and the unachieved dreams fascinate him, he gets his energy from them. His desire to paint put in second place for years started to emerge with vigor. There is a need for him to transfer in paint his experiences both lived and felt, his visual emotions. This with an intuitive application that he puts on canvas, in flamboyant tones, his dialogue with Brazil. Julien Porisse has an incessant curiosity for the past masters, such as the abstract expressionists of post war America, studying their techniques, he impregnates, inspires himself, in the same manner that he admires his Brazilian painter friends. Julien Porisse hardly leaves the traditional media, the canvas, he makes it his action area, his battle field. For Julien Porisse inspiration is without doubt exotic, his colors are organized and applied directly to the ‘line’, the stability, which creates his pictorial universe, be it geometric abstraction or not, towards the mark, the circle or the square; these transmit an immediate emotion. Since 2009, date at which he started to paint full time, sharing with his bother Liam the ateliers in Paris and São Paulo, Julien has had group and solo shows in Paris, Florence, London, Dublin, New York, and São Paulo. His large scale paintings are in his image, they express a colorful and sensitive vision of life.

Dominique Besse

Last edited 4 minutes ago by Blast Gallery

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