An
artist often travels through the dream realm with open eyes, lucid thought and
dream-like strides. Marc Giai-Miniet is an artist/dreamer painter, printmaker,
draftsman, a collector of curious myths and symbols, explorer of the
fantastical and maker of boxed tableaus from an imagination that tours the
dusty corners, libraries and basements of the mind. These are empty places
where unknown events took place and were left to decay from memory. Some
recorded in dusty books on sagging shelves in upper story attics while leaky
faucets, broken and dark basements guard the subterranean levels of the dream.
I find these works have a deep pull that draws me into the miniature corridors, up the stair cases and through the doorways to see if I can find the traces of the story left here. Marc’s impeccable detailing causes me to pause, wipe a small finger across a dusty bookshelf imagining the abandoned memory of the subconscious.
Born in 1946 in Trappes, France, Marc Giai-Miniet studied at the l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, a distinguished national school of Fine Arts in Paris, France. He is currently the Secretary of the Salon de Mai, a gallery founded in Paris with the purpose of encouraging and exhibiting younger abstract artists.
LANDING THE STARRY SKY
T
BOX CALLED THE LARGE SLEEVE
"The "boxes" have appeared relatively late in my work
as a painter, as a natural and necessary step, and have become an integral
part, a double play. As a reminder of my teenage desire to do theater and
may be even deeper yet my memories of childhood games pitched battles
between figurines and electric trains installed under the family dining table. These
"boxes" at the start of their production in the years 92 - 93,
repeated the themes of my paintings: brainwashing scene, visit the mummies,
agitation larvae and various transfusions. Small characters were cardboard cut
ballet and existential irony of my painting. Over work, constructions
becoming increasingly large, the characters have disappeared and books, whole
libraries have taken their place in conjunction with laboratories, storage
rooms, or waiting interrogation cells, stairs, Alleyways, ovens, drains or
outbound docks ... I understand that the books were burned, and figured, were a
painful metaphor of human life, both spirit and matter and inexorably doomed to
their fate. Not only because the books can be burned, but sometimes also
by the knowledge transmitted in them, we "burn", we transform while
they accompany us or lead us astray ... in a vision becoming "existential."
Human thought is written partly in fundamental books claimed by both
saints and by tyrants. Men show their books to the beauty of the universe
but also their peremptory chasms. Fragile and ephemeral as they are, they
are able to imbue our minds with the vision of happiness and the possible, of
spiritual enthusiasm and hope, able also to enroll the worst horrors. Everyone
will see, the whiteness of the black books sewers, a journey, a constant back
and forth between the two major poles of man’s bestiality and transcendence,
human frailty and divinely inaccessible".
Giai-Marc Miniet.
Marc Giai-Miniet, photo by Sylvie Giai-Miniet
TRANSIT AREA
FILLING THE BRAIN
TRANSFUSION MUMMIES
MINIET
DRIPPING
THE GOVERNOR'S WORKSHOP
THE WAREHOUSE
THE DEPARTURE
THE TOWER
DIGESTING THE GREAT
THE DROP ROOM - detail
FURNACE - detail
MEMORIE
Marc Giai-Miniet in his studio
You can see more of Marc Gai-Miniet’s works at his web site
