JPHI

As a young man, JPhi first discovered the naïve figurative art of Henri Rousseau, drawing inspiration for his early watercolors from the landscapes of French Guiana where he lived. Then came the revelation of Aboriginal art – an art of origins, sensitive, colorful, and poetic – with Rover Thomas as his first encounter. This was followed by Keith Haring's unique graphic style, which completed his references and guided his practice, first in painting and later in sculpture. The registers and iconography of these aesthetic movements left a lasting impression on him, inspiring him to create in turn.

An electrician by trade, a skill he applied in cinema, it was natural for JPhi to become acquainted with wire. He has been twisting it for 25 years, armed with his Leatherman pliers on film sets. There, fiction meets reality, just as in his sculptural practice. It is by populating the void with his wire creations that Jphi gave birth to his universe. The material inhabits and structures space with fantasy and lightness, offering a sculptural and poetic vision of the world as it is built. Characters and objects appear as a reflection of the real and familiar world around us. We recognize them, we encounter them daily: they are silhouettes, portraits, or profiles sculpted in postures and formats dictated by the artist's reverie and desire. They are sometimes pensive, mischievous, contemplative, rebellious… Using iron, aluminum, or copper wire, Jphi also shapes animals and plants from our world, always with poetry. His creations, born from a most often thin and light wire, are ethereal, sometimes mobile, and also convey the fragility and fleetingness of life. They speak to the child's heart, the poet's soul, the curious mind, and the conscience and imagination of everyone. With delicacy, humor, mischief, and sometimes anger. It is a whole palette of emotions that we are invited to feel when discovering JPhi's sculptures.

With his "Éclats" series, the artist weaves his steel wire web, capturing pieces of objects and revealing them like a disassembled 3D puzzle. A freeze-frame, a suspended explosion symbolizing a personal vision of matter that, at the viewer's discretion, disperses or reconstitutes itself. And finally, to preserve the lasting written mark of these emotions that govern us, Jphi offers sculpted, anamorphic declarations and messages, framed or arranged in thin steel cubes. An artistic and committed gesture to capture and magnify the word, and an elegant retort to the ephemeral nature of words in the age of new technologies