A self-taught artist and high school teacher in the Bordeaux region, Philippe Carcaly was born in 1966 in Talence (Gironde).  As a child - and we'll see how important this became in his work - he had a real passion for history and miniature soldiers, and frequently cut out images which he glued and assembled to recreate mini-decors of imaginary battle scenes.He owes his first love of art to his aunt, an amateur figurative painter whose paintings adorned the walls of the family home. The...

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  Biography of Philippe Carcaly

  A self-taught artist and high school teacher in the Bordeaux region, Philippe Carcaly was born in 1966 in Talence (Gironde).  As a child - and we'll see how important this became in his work - he had a real passion for history and miniature soldiers, and frequently cut out images which he glued and assembled to recreate mini-decors of imaginary battle scenes.
  He owes his first love of art to his aunt, an amateur figurative painter whose paintings adorned the walls of the family home. The young man discovered a number of artists: first the Impressionists, then, as the years went by, the works of Georges Rouault, Nicolas de Staël, Pierre Alechinsky, Jorge Camacho and Antonio Segui, who gradually became his influences; Bob Dylan's powerful lyrics also fed his imagination, which he tried to translate into his works. Philippe Carcaly gradually developed a "creative fever", and began drawing and painting at the age of 26. Since then, he has never stopped creating. Over the years, he incorporated collages into his drawings, which he cut out of press reviews from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (mainly L'Illustration, Le Petit Journal and La Petite Gironde).His technique gradually refined.  "I start with a shape in oil pastel on Bristol paper, on which I fix a head, a limb, an object ... then I remove material, sometimes I add more, I repaint with gouache, acrylic or oil, ... I scratch, I redraw," he writes.Philippe Carcaly tackles a wide variety of themes, including history (especially colonization), the circus arts, power and religion. "The result is above all dreamlike, strange and mysterious. Is it a dream to assemble faces and features, a man with a moustache and a sleeping woman, a new soul and a new being?" he says.Philippe Carcaly composes his "scenes" in a light-hearted manner, but more often than not plunges his heroes and heroines into the middle of a void, face to face with solitude. Using images from the past, the artist constructs a singular vocabulary of absurdity and irony, forcing us to ask ourselves a thousand questions about the Present and the Future. With finesse of line and poetry, between burlesque and surrealism, a sort of rebus of puzzling enigmas, like so many winks to buried civilizations, the artist works in series ("Voyageurs", "Hommes bulles", "Désaxés", etc.). Philippe Carcaly has exhibited little. His work, generally set against a dark background, is extremely beautiful, and we're sure you'll enjoy discovering it as much as we did!
  

  

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