Monographie Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï

"A man paints. That is to say, he dedicates his life to painting to the extent that painting becomes his life: An existential adventure, a way of journeying through space and time. His paintings are traces and milestones: what he generates and leaves behind for us who observe, throughout his journey. A man walks as if he were playing for his life. The commitment is total because he is wagering himself. It's a matter of destiny: of direction taken, but also of journey, will, and wandering, of detours and straight lines, of the risk of getting lost and the joy of getting lost, sometimes, when being lost saves him from too straight paths. This man enjoys playing with the risk of losing. He loves the rule that binds him, like a fruitful constraint, a way of renouncing the authority of the painter to let chance choose for him. As a painter, he knows that habit, routine, are bad advisors that bring you back, despite yourself, to what you already know too well, where he wants to confront what he doesn't know.

This traveling painter began by traversing the landscape in order to be able to paint it. Along the way, this landscape of chance and unknown paths became his place. Every journey eventually becomes an inner journey. The painting is an endless country, a lifetime would not be enough to explore its edges and overflows, folds and creases, forms and counter-forms... Painting is persistence, coming and going, digging while giving shape, endlessly. This painter's work unfolds in series, like so many stations which are as many metamorphoses of the same, as many ways of putting the work to work: of bringing forth what it shows and what it hides, what it contains and what it releases, this beauty sometimes restrained sometimes emerging, like a vital impulse finally imposing its reign.

This painter is like a physicist in action: a man who experiences the shape, texture, and weight of the world through painting as action. His art is experimental, concrete, and embodied. His work, as he progresses and goes beyond the play of rules and sidesteps, becomes increasingly free: not freed from his own rules, but seized by the pleasure of painting. Painting is a path and an act: a lived experience, that is to say, felt.

The artist begets the work, the work shapes the artist.
This one is named Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï."

Text by Pierre Wat, art historian, art critic, and professor of art history at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne.