Robert Ferri was born in the Médoc in 1951. Influenced by regional painters and “Les indépendants” of Bordeaux, the young artist feeds on the territory, the colors of the Arcachon bassin, various references between Fauvisme and post-cubism, practicing still life, painting on the motive, thus forging the search for his own artistic identity. In his painting and in his life, a need for escape is felt very quickly.
At 30, he left Aquitaine for Paris. His maturity in painting is built around the experience, with the need to express the strength of the essential, but also an idea of the elevation of the glance oriented towards the shades of blue that leads to a poetic memory, where the distortion of the real reveals his contemporary writing.
The exhibition “Objects of escape” returns on four decades of work of the painter. The writing evolves in an expressive figuration, to pass from the inheritance of pictorial history, lemons and still lifes, to a unique and personal language, like the story of a happy childhood, but also of the dream of an imaginary elsewhere.
In the color and the collages, the letters in the background of the canvas, the story is made present. The ochres evoke family origins, the south. The blue, the vision of a future and the vastness of the opportunities, like a work such as Vers l’avenir which presents a young man from the back, a rare human figure of the exhibition, often evoked by the The artist’s panoply and these objects inhabited by everyday life. Robert Ferri presents here a vocabulary in which he goes beyond reality by creating a mythology of the intimate around the object.
The evocation of the desire of the motionless journey that is found in these suitcases, planes, boats and cars, reminiscent of the toy, takes us with pleasure and nostalgia to an imaginary destination.