From 18 April to 18 May 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
His father, a bookseller, stationer and printer, and his mother, a musician, passed on to him a taste for printing, books, reading, writing and drawing.
The family left Algeria in 1938 for Rodez, where Jean-Pierre began to draw, self-taught.
His first exhibition, of drawings on the theme of the landscapes of the Rouergue, was held in Rodez in 1950. From these years in the Aveyron our artist remembers his admiration for Max Ernst, Robert Motherwell and Gustav Klimt, and his meetings with Pierre Soulages.
In 1952 he moved to Paris, dividing his time between Éméville (Oise) and Montparnasse.
A highly significant encounter for Jean-Pierre Vielfaure came in 1956: the German painter Carl Buchheister (1890-1964), whom he would name as his spiritual father in painting and whom he would host at Éméville for six months of every year. C. Buchheister was a very close friend of Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters; from the last two he above all retained “non-exclusive geometric constructions” and “collages in a Surrealist spirit”, while his own membership of the Hanover School can be read in his propensity to “cut up his canvases, with lines, into flat areas of bright colour”. And, again according to Jacques Busse, the pictorial aim of Buchheister, which Vielfaure would claim as his own, can be defined as: “attempting to give concrete form to the synthesis of apparently heterogeneous elements, reconciling a geometric construction of the picture plane with a gestural poetics of the Informel, without giving up an amused recourse to the post-Dada materials of collage”.
In 1958 Jean-Pierre Vielfaure became friends with Édouard Jaguer and joined the Phases movement. Jean-Pierre Vielfaure and Wifredo Lam, with lithographs, and Remo Martini, with woodcuts, illustrated the tenth issue, in 1965, of this limited-edition bibliophile review, entitled
Phases – Cahiers internationaux de recherches littéraires et plastiques (ed. Paul Facchetti).
By joining the Inter group in 1965, formed mainly of Scandinavian artists,
Jean-Pierre Vielfaure began a long relationship with the city of Copenhagen, through stays and exhibitions as well as editions of his prints.
Between 1968 and 1971, while also contributing illustrations to the magazine Rock & Folk, Jean-Pierre Vielfaure undertook his “monumental” work entitled Opéra Civilisation, a series of seventy-two paintings (collage, acrylic, mixed media) set side by side over a length of forty-two metres in which, as Sébastien Moinet-Béchar comments, “the historical, ideological and artistic story of our civilisation is evoked, from the creation of the world to our unknown future”.
In 1970 Vielfaure spent a long period in Lapland, and in Ibiza. His returns to the island inspired the series of more than fifty canvases (1970-1973) all entitled Les portes d’Ibiza, shown in turn in Ibiza, Copenhagen and Helsinki in 1973. His first long stay in New York and Canada, in 1977, gave rise to a series of mixed-media works, Journal new-yorkais, mainly on paper and presented as diptychs in which writing, collage and abstraction sit side by side.
In 1988 he set up his studio in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the Manufacture des Œillets.
His series of paintings L’appel aux esprits (2007) gave Jean-Pierre Vielfaure the opportunity to speak about his own spirituality: “It began in Scandinavia. There, where I sold a thousand canvases in twenty-five years, I saw all the museums concerned with shamanic rites… Being self-taught, my curiosity remains open and intact. Although I was brought up among Catholics, my spirituality leans rather towards the shamans. Each shaman has his own spirituality, in relation to the clouds, or wood, or a particular animal. Shamanism is my true religion. It opens onto another world.”
Artist: Jean-Pierre Vielfaure