Other works : Drawing

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60 Email: info@artnet.ch

Site : piezanowski-art.over-blog.com

Visit by appointment

Biography

J.J. Piezanowski was born in 1952. Following his early efforts in a contemporary pictorial idiom, he went on to acquire a solid grounding in painting techniques: drawing, composition, oil and watercolor techniques… Then came his classical period as a member of the International Society of Figurative Art. Exhibitions of his works were staged in France, Germany, the U.S. and Japan while he pursued his regular job as a metallurgical engineer.

Having fully mastered the painter’s art, he reverted to contemporary idioms, expressing himself in recent years in a post-modern neo-expressionist style.

Exploring the human soul, Piezanowski seeks to capture the signs of time’s flight. His scenic depictions and portraits display de-structured faces and contrasting colors, accentuated as by stigmata of existence. Yet behind the eyes of his subjects you can always find gentleness and some form of inner grace. In such eyes glow sparks of hope.

The artist’s ink drawings are spare, capturing expressions or emotions with simple, often single spontaneous strokes.

Contrasting with this atmosphere, his titles convey a sense of blitheness, seasoned with a touch of poetry and humor, sole defense against a a sometimes violent world – much like life itself.

Visit by appointment

Born in Tunisia of an Italian mother and a Russian father, Daniel Podva soon embraced the blend of cultures borne since Antiquity by the winds of Mediterranean history.

The man is ageless. Entirely self-taught, he adopted the culture of France, whose poetry and refinement today structure his sensibility.

Moving to Paris, he turned to advertising photography as a career, ultimately leading to steady collaboration with the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

Daniel Podva’s professional trajectory drew him to the world of art. Inspired by Botticelli following a trip to Florence, he took up painting.

His artistic interest focussed on the women of France enhanced in his earlier photography.

He sees them as nostalgic, with a hint of absence in their gaze that leaves the onlooker with an impression of unattainability.

Suggestive of mystery, love and even drama, his subjects exclude indifference.

 
Contact: Severine Metraz – 31, Route Prémanon – La Doye – 39220 Les Rousses (France)
Tel:  +33 (03) 84 33 59 65 – Mobile: +33 (06) 38 65 03 72
Email: severine.metraz@yahoo.fr
Site: http://severinemetrart.blogspot.com

Visit by appointment

The artist in her own words:

I was born on August 28, 1972, in Lons-Le-Saunier, France. I live with a companion from the Swiss canton of Valais (Wallis) and paint in Les Rousses, a small French winter resort close to the Swiss border, dividing my time between France and Switzerland.

Since I was a child, I have known I would be an artist. I played at being a writer or a painter. Already attracted to beauty, colors and atmospheres, I spent most of my time drawing. I aimed less at technical performance or faithful likeness than at expressing what I felt and what moved me. As an independent young woman, I was soon deeply involved in the realities of life, with more than my share of trouble and hardship.

An artist from birth, I grew impatient at not having become one yet. I nonetheless fulfilled my obligations with realism, knowing my day would eventually come.

Thanks to the man I share my life with and to our
children, at 35 years of age I was reborn. At last I was painting. After all that time! All these paintings hidden away deep in my heart, my mind, my gut… I was carried away, exploring my creative territory euphorically and joyfully. My paintbrush finally ran free.

With various techniques, I’ve sought to capture poetry and joy. My acrylic works draw their inspiration from buildings, human skulls, the female form… Suppressed for too long, they radiate incredible vitality, expressed in a range of colors and energetic brushstrokes.

My pictorial quest has at last found meaning, escaping from reality by way of selected themes and losing myself in an imaginary world.

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60 Email: info@artnet.ch

Katy GRAN put together some archive material to make a film.

Take a look at it:  www.peintre-nico.fr

I’ve met a painter. His name is Nico 

Christiane Franquin / artnet.ch. November 2010

Don’t bother trying to come up with a biography of a contemporary French painter called Nico, you won’t find one. The man himself is tight-lipped regarding his past. The best one can do is guess his age, fortyish. As he says of himself “sometimes I’m an old man, sometimes I’m a kid”.

He suscribes to what Kijno wrote in his notebook in 1962:

“Painting is a deadly business; like it or not, it’ll cost you your life. It’s not a hobby for swells. I know how to fight and nobody’s got anything on me in that respect – I’ve been that way since childhood. But even if my struggle with the canvas is a violent one, it’s matched by my affection – for humanity, for the stars, for stones!”

Nico’s trademark is excess – in emotions, in tenderness and in violence of every kind. He spent something like fifteen years confined to his workshop. So, daubs or masterpieces? Nothing to show for his efforts save a few hundred works lost, destroyed or tossed into a fireplace…

Since then he’s gone back to his workshop and started painting again, on roll after roll of canvas. Nothing seems capable of impeding his power or his productivity.

His figurative works have a style of its own although they may incorporate the influence of  the likes of Matisse, Goya, Motherwell, Rubens, Bacon, Gorki, Ingres, Van Gogh… yet they’re definitively Nico. Fond of subverting and reinterpreting known themes, he also draws his inspiration from myths and legends, adding his own chapter to the history of painting as he goes. Both existential debates and literary and philosophical writings nourish his musings, with his reactions and revolts flung onto the waiting canvas.

Nico’s canvasses take a beating, too. He walks all over them and always seems to paint standing or crouched, always working from above, never face to face… He also knows a thing or two about fighting. He once took up boxing. And for him boxing was about getting hit. In 2004 he quit. He now experienced violence as a thrust instead of an impact. Hence his fascination with sumotoris, a parable for today’s mortals and today’s painters, whose battles are no longer external but internal. Mutilation yields to inner destruction: to exist, sumotoris strive to deconstruct themselves.

Nonetheless Nico has learned to hope, painting all manner of maternity and pietà scenes, guerillas, saints, copulations, tortures, kisses – sometimes angel, sometimes devil… but an ogre always!

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60 Email: info@artnet.ch
WORKSHOP VISIT

Stephanie Fonteyn is an English painter who lives in Nyon, Switzerland. She grew up in an artistic environment, surrounded by graphic design, music and dance. As a self-taught artist, she began to paint in 2002 as a hobby in Spain.

Stephanie’s first paintings were bright colourful nudes. Then she started to explore abstracts that are comparable to the works of Mondrian and Pollack. In 2007 when Stephanie rented her first art studio in Nyon, powerful and colourful portrait paintings emerged on canvas. In 2010, Stephanie started to paint her Jazz collection that has been exhibited in a gallery during the Montreux Jazz festival.
“I paint for myself. Painting is a form of meditation for me, which allows me to disconnect from the real world. It’s a form of expression like music, poetry, dance or singing. Through my paintings, I strive to unravel the authenticity of humanity. This search has led me to the theme of portraits “without masks”.
Children, the elderly, African and musicians’ portraits particularly inspire me because they normally wear no masks. Children and their innocence, the elderly and their wisdom, Africans and their social and family values which still remain intact compared to other societies, and musicians who express their emotions freely through their music.
Sadly, we are loosing a sense of authenticity in our modern day and Americanised society due to the hectic, high-pressure lifestyles and throwaway society that most of us accept to live in today. The message that I want to share via my work is that we should slow down, take time to listen and reconnect to others and ourselves around us before it’s too late.

WORKSHOP VISIT

On completing her degree in history, Isabelle left Lyon for Geneva where, in 1992, she enrolled at the Institut Universitaire des Études du Développement de Genève (IUED). The years she spent at the IUED were highly politicized and focused on third world issues which she turned away from to dedicate herself to painting.

She prefers working with oil pastels on paper and oil paints on plywood which offer her the possibility to render reality in its three dimensions (with a particular emphasis on depth) transposing it into an explosive burst of emotion.

Isabelle’s excessive, emotional personality expresses itself in single one-off spurts of creativity – like live performances – to which she rarely returns once the work is completed. In one go she “throws” colors, forms and lines onto her canvas like a poet using the « écriture automatique » (freewriting) technique.

For Isabelle Arn, the act of pictural creation is the release of fragments of feelings experienced in her encounters with people, states of mind and heart, moods. An interior world of fantasy, freedom and feminity.

Doing dishes becomes a pretext for fleeing from the here and now to a dreamworld. Expressing a desire to not conform or the impossibility to take action. Alluding to the huge gulf that separates the roles we play from the lives we dream of leading. Expressing too an infinite interior freedom and the boundless energy released by it.

Between a naïve world of the fantastic and an expressionistic urgency, her work speaks of expectation or ennui, sensuality, stolen moments in time, movement, vital energy, the strength of the dream, joy, happiness, light, the beauty of colors which vibrate in harmony.

Isabelle is a painter inhabited by a type of exaltation and a primitive life form existing at the heart of each moment in time – even within the artifices of today’s ultra-sophisticated societies. When painting, she lets her hand take over. Like a shamanistic rite in which the spirit and the subconscious – rather than the intellect – lead the way, her painting pays tribute to « letting go », to freedom, to a kind of wandering in a semi-delirious state.

And yet, Isabelle Arn never for a moment turns her back on the beauty of the surrounding world, and she fully recognizes the importance of giving generous expression to feelings and emotions.

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60 Email: info@artnet.ch

Studio visits by appointment

Biography

Born in Bulle, Switzerland, 30 October 1952.

Member of the Swiss Society of Artists of Fine Arts.
Graduated from the University of Geneva in Pedagogy. Diploma from the School of Fine Arts in Bern. Language and art teacher for several years in Switzerland, France and Brazil. Accomplished numerous humanitarian missions as a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in Africa (Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Mali, Senegal, Uganda, Ethiopia) as well as in Asia (Thailand, Cambodia) for seven years. Since 1992, has dedicated herself to her art (mixed media, engraving, acrylic, oil etc.)

Exhibits on a regular basis in Switzerland as well as abroad.

After a classical apprenticeship, the artist focussed for a decade on research on mixed techniques and a study of different materials used in abstract painting. In recent years, she has concentrated on oil painting. She has now reached a point where she can express her artistic maturity and affirm a personal approach with an important measure of originality. Her “new landscapes” fully reveal her willingness to take risks, her power and her sensitivity.

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60  Email: info@artnet.ch

Studio visits by appointment

Jean-François Berger was born in Geneva in 1952. He started oil painting when he was eight years old (Cours Martenot).

After a long interruption, he took up painting again ten years ago and completed courses in expression and composition (Charles Vogt) and in figure drawing (Pascal Saini) at the School of Decorative Arts in Geneva. For over 20 years, Jean-François Berger has been working in various countries as a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Works on paper

Contact: artnet.ch – Christiane Franquin, 1268 Begnins, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 22 366 42 22 / +41 (0) 76 521 50 60 Email: info@artnet.ch

WORKSHOP VISIT

Saskia Bremer was born in Holland, in 1954.
She lives and works in Holland, Portugal and Switzerland.

Some people take a roundabout way before actually settling down to what they really want to do. Saskia Bremer discovered in her early days her passion for art.

However, faced with the practical demands of life, Saskia decided to take a teacher training course with drawing as her specialization. She then worked many years in different schools. As her passion for art never subsided, she decided in 1986 to leave the roundabout and to enroll as an evening student at the Royal Academy in The Hague. In spite of  the very strict regime at the Academy not being entirely to her liking, she finished her studies successfully in 1991.

Freed from the rules of the Academy Saskia quickly developed her own style. With bright colours and a combination of the realistic and the abstract as the key elements in her work, she rapidly launched into a very successful professional career as an artist.  After her first sell-out exhibition in 1994, Saskia decided to reduce her hours of teaching, and two years later became a full time artist.

Her name soon started circulating throughout art-loving Holland. Various assignments and exhibitions came her way – not only in the Netherlands but also in countries like Belgium, Germany and Portugal. At the Boukamel Contemporary Art Gallery in London all of her works displayed were sold within days.

One well known art critic in Holland compared Saskia’s works with Chagall’s. A welcome though perhaps slightly exaggerated compliment, it is however undeniable that Saskia’s work “makes you happy” – as said an elderly lady who, after her husband’s death, bought one of Saskia’s paintings . That was more than enough encouragement for Saskia to continue on her artistic path, spreading light and happiness through her works.

(Ronald Zimet, art collector)

Selection of main exhibitions

• 1996 The Hague, Netherlands, Holland Art Fair
• 1997 Amsterdam, Foundation of Modern Art
• 1998 London, Boukamel Contemporary Art Gallery
• 1999 Alphen a.d. Rijn, Netherlands, Galerie Helga Hofman
• 2000 Almancil, Portugal, Centro cultural de São Lourenço
• 2001 Amstelveen, Netherlands, Museum Jan van der Togt
• 2002 Vale do Lobo, Portugal, Galería de Arte
• 2003 Aalsmeer, Netherlands, Sport & Art Contest, Athènes 2004
• 2004 Lisbonne, Portugal, Galerías do Palacio Sotto Mayor
• 2005 Loule, Portugal, Galería de Arte Convento Espírito Santo
• 2006 Vale do Lobo, Galería de Arte
• 2007 Monheim am Rhein, Germany, Galerie Per-Opti

Contact: Peter CERUTTI
Tel: +41 (0)21 728 13 91 / +33 493 94 11 24  Email: petercerutti@bluewin.ch

Biography

Portrait of the artist

Peter Cerutti is an internationally recognized physician-scientist. For his contributions to our current understanding of cancer and ageing, he has been awarded prestigious international prizes. Interrupting his scientific career, Cerutti followed his second vocation, re-directing his creative energy to painting after having attended the “Beaux Arts “‘and “Arts Décoratifs” schools of art in Paris.

Cerutti’s subject matter is the timeless form of nature and, in particular, of the human form. His multifaceted vision looks into the 21st century from the perspective of today’s complexities and promises. His paintings uniquely express the emotions of the life of today. He achieves this by the masterful use of texture, color and form.

The Arts of the 20th century have been strongly influenced by progress in the physical and medical sciences. In particular, the importance of the subconscious layers of our mind has been recognized by Freud, Jung and others. In artistic circles this has resulted in the notion that the automatic expression of the subconscious should result in revolutionary “modern” works.

However, only few artists have succeeded in creating such works of genuine “art brut” (primitive art). Indeed, I question the concept that artistic emotions are more readily communicated by circumventing the conscious mind. How, otherwise, could we explain the lasting impact of the traditional work of great painters of the past centuries ? In my work, I attempt to express the spirit of today (“Zeitgeist”). I strive to communicate fundamental feelings and laws of nature by organizing basic patterns of color and form into the figurative contents of my paintings.

Permanent galleries

• C.C. Art Monte Carlo – Place du Casino, Monte Carlo: tel. +377 (0) 93 30 28 22
• Galerie du Marché – 8, Place du Marché, 1820 Montreux, Switzerland – tel. +41 (0) 21 963 05 17

• Plexus Gallery – Rue du Lac 61, Clarens, Suisse

Newspaper articles

• Magazine ELLE (FRA) 2004
• La Stampa (IT) 2004
• Excellence (ENG) 2004
• Paris Match (FRA) 2007
• Magazine ELLE (FRA) 2007