PHILIPPE CHITARRINI
Represented by Galerie Floss & Schultz in Cologne (Germany), and B&B FineArt (Switzerland)
DNAP (National Diploma of Fine Arts) from the Aix-en-Provence School of Art
DEA (Advanced Studies Diploma) in Visual Arts from the University of Aix-en-Provence
Master's degree in Art History from the University of Aix-en-Provence
Philippe Chitarrini, born in 1966, is a French minimalist visual artist who creates radical paintings and sculptures. He studied Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Aix-en-Provence and graduated from ESAAIX (Aix-en-Provence School of Art). He lives and works in the South of France and in Hangzhou, where he teaches at the CAA (China Academy of Art).
The juxtaposition of matte and glossy surfaces characterizes Philippe Chitarrini's work. While the matte surfaces radiate calm, the glossy elements, acting like mirrors, draw the environment into the artwork, creating a passive, figurative element. The exhibition space, with its stillness or movement, nature, or architecture, is consciously included in the work.
I am interested in formal solutions because they seem to me linked to an idea of truth in painting; this truth is, first and foremost, the paint on the canvas. I have abandoned all forms of representation, however far removed from the model, to devote myself fully to a refined, radical abstract art, close to minimalism. While Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous motto "Less is more," taken to mean formal stripping away, reductivism, and neutrality, remains relevant in my work, certain principles of minimalism are, on the other hand, called into question. A form of passive figuration, for example, reappears through the simple use of reflective materials, which act like mirrors in my works. My glossy, flat surfaces unexpectedly reintroduce images of people or landscapes depending on their location, thus creating random tensions.
The square remains my primary motif. It functions as a basic module that I endlessly adapt by playing on subtle formal and chromatic relationships, bordering on the invisible, thus inviting the viewer to move around in front of my pieces. A motif that often disappears to give way to the empty space of a form or a counter-form, which interacts with the space of the place where it is exhibited. Articulated from a reduced formal vocabulary - basic geometric figures, lines, and flat areas of color - my work uses the impersonality of its execution to attempt to materialize its own presence in the world. It refers only to itself. My artistic approach is built on the creation of a reality intended to integrate itself as such into another visual reality, one that is larger and less organized. It is undoubtedly in this way that my colors and materials can have a concrete identity and that the boundary between sculpture and painting is currently blurred for me.
In Search of Pure Painting
I could represent landscapes, objects, or figures through my paintings, or even give free rein to my imagination to offer an interpretation of my recent dreams or those I might have in the future. But that's not the case. I have eliminated all forms of representation from my work.
I paint paintings that present painting itself, pictorial propositions. Others have done so before me, certainly, but I strive to do it with my own means, taking into account the main components of painting in order to question them.
Among these components, space, or more precisely, the arrangement of space, remains my most important concern.
When Roland Botrel wrote about my work in 2017, he already had a keen sense of it: “It’s no longer like before, the shock of a single-color painting hanging on a wall, but rather the consideration of the wall transformed by the touch of color… What am I saying, the wall! The entire space!!!”
A little further on, he concluded: “There is still a desire to build, to break free from the frame, to invade the space.”
To sum up, I am less interested in form and light than in space. Form, like light, is merely a pretext to allow pictorial space to appear as such and to extend beyond the limits of the canvas. I seek a pure painting, one that doesn’t ask the viewer to immerse themselves in contemplation, but rather to enter into its dynamic. The viewer must constantly move around the space surrounding my canvases to perceive their subtleties and project their extension into the place that receives them.
