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Wilfried Isnard

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Wilfried Isnard

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From 25/02/2016to 30/06/2016
Wilfried Isnard, artist name Menhir, was born in Digne les Bains in 1985. He has strong ties with Corsica. very young he would have liked to study Fine Arts but that's not what will happen. His artistic training will be totally autodidact. His raw material come from streets and abandoned spots. At the beginning, he joins a graffiti group and forms a crew with Haze another graffiti artist. They sign their works NSP (No Sé Porque). They are involved in many projects in high schools in their region. Wilfried pursues his experience by joining another crew in Nice called NMI zero.

Little by little Wilfired moves away from his first line of creation. He will do many trips, not only in Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium) but also in Notrh America (United States and Canada). On a regular basis, he starts visiting Art and History museums, his two main interests. These trips open up his appetite for creation. Among his best memories, Wilfried talks about the Tinguely Foundation with its animated machines, the Bayeler Museum also in Bâle where he sees for the first time Egon Schiele's works which fascinate him. In New York his attention gets struck by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns's works. He visits many times the Chillida's exhibition  organized by the Maeght Foundation in 2011. He is also moved by Joseph Beuys, Pierre Soulages, Edward Kienholz, de Duane Hanson, Caravage, Christo, Arman or César.

Wilfried will make a stop for two years in Canada. Reading the "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri, "The New and Old Testaments" in the Bible, Cioran's "Précis de décomposition et de l'inconvénient d'être né" allows him to improve the issue of what he really wants his creations to be. He gets into the habit of picking up lost materials here and there (dust, sheets of metal, wrinkled newspapers, iron, wood, etc…). He will return to France with a huge heavy bag of odd wastes.

From that time, Mehnir will work by himself. He starts working on his canvases by aggregating whatever he has collected and calling the set of his series "Tempus fugit" (times is fleeing). The artist is always looking for rundown places he called deposits. Industrial wastelands, abandoned houses or other grounds sacrificed by passing time become real sources of inspiration., With his own eyes, his own hands, on the walls or all over the grounds, he sees the archeology of time, the holy link between things and mankind. "Wherever I look, I keep linking things to the connections they forged with time. These "things" then fit into a timeline allowing them to come back into the useful world of for others to start their countdown. Menhir's way of composing his canvases is based on the retranscription - pretty much the same - of the state of material and objects when they were found and picked up.

Darblay factories in Corbeille Essone, ore extraction factory in Nonza, Corsica but also coal industrial wastelands in Monceau les Mines, old ruins in the Jabron valley, cars scrap yard in Piedguichard or garbage dumps and many others places.
Just like us we hope you'll enjoy discovering Wilfired's memory work.


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