Le Portique presents Songe d’un jour d’été, an exhibition by Philipe Mayraux which leads visitors into his dreamlike and fantastic world, populated by deities, chimeras and characters from a lost world. Fuelled by literary references from the genre of science fiction (Lovecraft, Asimov), though also relying on mythological and classic references, the painter uses his work to question the history of art and the history of our civilisations, evoking Western, Eastern and Asian cultures and merging these different universes to create his own cosmogony.

Opening the doors of perception, this exhibition questions the gaze and the creation of images, playing with fractals. Backgrounds and forms merge to invent new mental and physical spaces. Paintings, sculptures, masks and objects testify to this personal cosmogony.

Making these multiple layers his fertile ground, the artist creates a singular universe ex nihilo, playing with perceptions and the real to develop his own phantasmagoria. His work as a painter is subtle, with a poetic, singular and uncompromising vision of the world around us.

Bio

Philippe Mayaux is a French visual artist born in 1961, who seeks, pronounces or denounces a sense of the world through his representations. From expression to symbol, meaning slips into this gap between reality and its repetition, adding a perspective to the latter whose reality is essentially orphaned. The sculpted or painted image is his preferred mechanism. Heir to a constant questioning of this mechanism, even in its social and political consequences; heir to the immense modern adventure provisionally concluded by abstraction, as well as surrealism or kitsch; and inventor of and heir to the arts of attitude and installation, the artist adds an additional distance to the mechanism of the image that could be translated in the expression "faire image", to make into an image. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize.