PIERRE GUIMET
I was born in 1953 in France, where I live and work on the shores of Lake Léman (Lake Geneva), in Haute-Savoie in the French Alps.
I have a background in architecture studies in Lyon, Geneva, and Grenoble, and musicology in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, and am now focusing on visual arts.
This unusual and multidisciplinary training led me to pursue various careers, such as steel frame designer, jazz pianist, cook, gardener, silicon specialist, ballroom organist, styled objects and luminaries’ prototype designer, and piano teacher.
Over the years I have been teaching watercolor techniques in various associations as well as in my own artist studio while working as a visual artist with children and adults with disabilities in specialized institutions.
My artistic practice reflects this journey, ranging from painting to site-specific installations, photography, video, and writings.
Over time, my pictorial work has focused on geometric and minimalist abstraction, concrete art.
The square, as an emblematic shape of modernity, is my preferred field of action—or perhaps my playground?
I use a limited color palette of black, gray, and white, in watercolor, and acrylic, sometimes adding black silicone, generally on small formats that respond to and complement each other and can be grouped into diptychs, triptychs, or form other coherent series, with a limited vocabulary, made up of points, lines, strips, squares, rectangles.
Giving up color, as a form of stripping down, I have essentially focused my pictorial approach on spatial organization, balance/imbalance of composition, and interactions between empty and full spaces.
The combined use of watercolor and acrylic fits into this theme of emptiness/fullness, transposing it into the duality of the ephemeral/stable.
The transparency of watercolor, its fragility, lightness, spontaneity as it reacts to water, questions the permanence, immobility, and impermeability of acrylic.
A questioning arises from this dialogue and controversy, about the very nature of the artistic act, its meaning, and its inscription or non-inscription in the world.
