Antoine Puisais
Born: 1975
Hometown: Cannes
Based in: Cannes
“I have only fractured and vague memories of my often dark and fraught childhood. It took till my early twenties for the realization to dawn that something inside me was deeply broken and that’s when I started painting… I found painting healing… it filled in the cracks… and it became a new world I could explore emotionally and intellectually... It became addictive, a fix in every sense... I didn’t ask myself if I was or wasn’t an artist. I just knew that I was.”
Antoine Puisais lasted half a day at art school. Maybe it was arrogance or immaturity, but for Puisais the act of painting was a primal urge, not a to be mediated and contained by classrooms and career plans. It was an itch that needed to be scratched.
So he went D.I.Y. his path littered with many errors and fewer, hard-won victories. Somewhere along the way he discovered that what he loved, what he had a kind of fatalistic obsession with, was that moment that always comes in acts of the creations, the moment of finely poised balance between success and ruin, the precise point beyond which the wrong move, the misplaced gesture, would be irredeemable.
Accordingly Puisais is fascinated not only by the visible, by what can be seen on the work’s surface, but also by the invisible, marks and passages that have been removed or those that were imagined but never made. So the works are both full and broad, incorporating painting and printing, collages of found objects, areas of deliberate damage, wild and precise in varying measures. Each one is a contested zone, between what is and what might be, held in tension between the forces of creation and destruction.
“For me, creation is a binary act… I add and I remove and what interests me it is what remains, what survives this soft war between the manifest and the hidden.”
18 works for sale
Antoine Puisais In The Studio
"Concerning the studio life, it's really where everything's happen. This is where the painting is discovered, where it is transformed, where it communicates with the other paintings. It is in these 50 square meters that everything takes place."
More About Antoine Puisais
What inspires you?
The common, the banal, what surrounds me. The architecture mainly, the ruins but also a lot of images found here and there that come to feed my painting. Everything is a source of inspiration from the moment you know how to look, you know how to appropriate and above all you know how to transform.
Describe your creative process.
My approach is simple, I use what surrounds me to translate what is inside me. I am not a painter strictly speaking but more of an archaeologist, my paintings are first discovered and then repaired. I have developed a unique process of transferring paint onto canvas close to printing with a stamp. This process, which is very shaky, leaves a huge field for errors, accidents and alterations. This is where my work begins, to make links, to find bridges, in order to give back a unity to all these fragments of paintings.
What are 3 words that best describe your work?
architecture, archaeology, structure.
Who are some artists that have influenced your work?
A lot. If we speak about the most famous, Basquiat in my early years, Cy Twombly, Donald Baechler, Christopher Wool definitely . But also, Richard Aldrich, Raoul de Keyser, Joseph Hart.
What is the most important tool when creating your work?
The eye
What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
Be yourself, be intuitive, stay honest, find harmony.
Where do you go for inspiration?
In the studio
Credentials
Exhibitions
Composing and Caring
2017
Let the legs do the work
2015
Between the manifest and the hidden
2015
Idea
2014
IDEA
2014
Exhibitions
Composing and Caring
2017
Let the legs do the work
2015
Between the manifest and the hidden
2015
Idea
2014
IDEA
2014