Last fall, anyone who walked into MAAT Gallery in Paris was introduced to the French artist Geoffroy Pithon’s colorful world.
The exhibition, “Botanique Murmure,” was an exploration by Pithon of nature and botany that used abstraction to depict nature, color and shape. After the successful show, Pithon, a graphic designer turned painter, was itching to make similar work on a much bigger canvas in an even more immersive space.
From Thursday to Saturday, nearly a year later, he will have that opportunity when MAAT presents a solo wall-to-wall booth of his work at Frieze Seoul. (It is the gallery’s first time participating in the art fair.) Visitors to the booth will be met with an explosion of color and patterns from Pithon. This time, he has not just created the paintings, but the ceiling-to-floor wallpaper that they will hang upon. The 19 new paintings and wallpaper, titled “The Four Seasons,” explore the changing of the seasons through various botanical forms and abstract shapes.
Autumn is rich in reds and pinks; summer is warm with oranges, yellows and pinks; winter shifts into deep blues accented with bright pinks, greens and oranges; and spring is filled with blooming greens.
“It’s not as direct or simple as blue for winter, green for autumn, though in a way it is that simple, too,” Pithon said. “But nothing is fixed. Everything keeps evolving, shifting, changing, transforming.”
“This exhibition continues a question I’ve had for years: Where does painting begin, and where does it end?” Pithon, 38, said in a recent interview. The answer, like Pithon’s work, is complicated. “It’s difficult to say because it never really ends.”
After years of muted palettes, “quiet luxury” and sad beige minimalism dominating fashion, interiors and art, Pithon’s use of patterns and vivid colors is a welcome change. Pithon’s work also challenges the stereotype that French art and design are inherently understated, and celebrates the part of French life that is playful, loud and colorful.
“For Seoul, I wanted Geoffroy to create an island of immersion that puts people in his world of color,” said Paul William, founder and director of MAAT Gallery. “His work is dreamy. It’s about joy and the way he works with color can really change your mood, because color can be therapy.”
The paintings that make up “The Four Seasons” are a nod to the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi’s set of four violin concertos. Pithon said that despite its title, the exhibition was not a literal depiction of the four seasons, but a way of drawing a parallel between painting and music, and the ways a composer translates the rhythm of nature into something that can be felt, not just heard or seen. He added that he typically thinks of painting as music. And like a composer, he thinks of his paintings “as sequences, chapters, motifs, variations.”
Born and raised in Angers in the west of France, Pithon studied graphic design at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and was part of Formes Vives, a graphic design collective, for nearly a decade before he began painting. Graphic design, he felt, allowed him to literally communicate, often on posters with a direct message. But over time, the need to always have some overt message was too restrictive, he said, so he turned to what was left on the page when the words were stripped away: colors and shapes.
This led him to painting. Pithon would spend whatever time he could painting, he said. Soon, he was blending his design skills with his new passion.
“In a way, I began painting on a computer,” Pithon said. “My background as a graphic designer means my first exploration of color, composition and material happened in Photoshop and other digital tools, before I ever went to paper.”
Creating on a screen, where color is made with light, unlike on paper where pigment is less saturated, helped him sharpen his eye for color. Realizing that he could not translate the depth and vibrancy of the colors he was creating on the screen onto paper, Pithon turned to screen printing, and his process was born.
That process, particularly as it relates to the work he is showing in Seoul, consists of hand-painting on canvas then zooming into a smaller piece of that painting, scanning it, enlarging it, layering it on itself repeatedly and printing it at an enormous scale. In Seoul, these larger-than-life parts of the paintings make up the wallpaper. The original painting and the computer-created wallpaper are then in dialogue, one on top of the other.
Despite finding commercial success (he has worked with brands such as Hermès and Sézane), Pithon notes that being self-taught is still not the norm in France, a country that values rigid academic tradition at prestigious fine art schools. This sense of being an outsider has not kept him from continuing to create as he pleases. In fact, one signature of his work is the way he layers the neon paint that he makes himself.
“In France, academic painting has often regarded neon color as vulgar — too loud, too commercial, too pop — which is perhaps exactly why I like it,” he said, laughing.
Vincent Tuset-Anrès, founder of Fotokino, a gallery in Marseilles, France, met Pithon 12 years ago when he invited the Formes Vives collective to show its work at his space. Since then, he and Pithon have become friends and collaborators. Tuset-Anrès said Pithon was an easy partner who works fast, understands the assignments and is fun to work with, while also taking his practice seriously.
“I like the energy that you can feel when he’s working and in his paintings when he is done,” he said. “They are full of color and energy and there’s something very alive about them.”
Pithon said he painted a world in which he would like to live, and hoped the pleasure he experienced while painting was contagious and reached the viewer.
“Geoffroy expresses himself best with immersive, large-scale artworks, but because of the market he often has to adapt and do smaller work,” William said. “Frieze is an opportunity to do what’s really in his DNA.”
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