Flipo Emmanuel

Emmanuel Flipo, born in Agen (France), lives and works in Montreuil (Sous Bois in Seine Saint-Denis) and Pézenas (France).

For many years Emmanuel Flipo has been the best known artist in Pezenas, notorious for his attention seeking events and parties featuring transvestites, scantily clad beauties and provocative statements and this year, with the opening of his new ‘Depot Flipo’ he has gone one step further by enlarging his corner of the pretty tourist town of Pezenas.

Actually, in private Flipo is a serious and hard working artist with a grounding in fine art; his etchings, drawings and watercolours made his reputation in the eighties and nineties of the last century in the area and he has a great facility with composition and technique together with a sympathetic understanding of the topography and tradition of the Languedoc.

Born in Agen he studied Beaux Arts at Toulouse and decorative arts at Nice before moving to Pezenas where he and his wife Corrine lived at the Hotel Alphonse, the renaissance maison de maitre which inspired many of his etchings and drawings. It was his numerous visits to New York and the US that caused a change in his art away from the more traditional disciplines and towards a more conceptual presence which included happenings and street theatre.

One such was the colouring of snow on the streets of New York with powder pigments projected from above to fall on the pristine snow. His preoccupation with decay and change in the material world can be seen increasingly in his large collages which are made using old wallpapers, decaying matter and paint and which latterly are increasingly based on pastiches of old master drawings made on a large scale.

He also has a penchant for earth pigments which ties in with his vision of the earth’s crust, used in granulations on watercolour paper and which have been seen in Parisian galleries. Although not as eye-catching as his large works, which of course are intended for public spaces where there is suffi cient wall surface to display them, his portraits and drawings of friends and models which can be seen in his Pezenas studio are sensitive and expressive of a gentler side to his character.

 Essentially a traditionalist whose art is rooted in the French art of the 18th century his various different manifestations, as street artist, conceptualist, transvestite nevertheless reveal a restless and questing spirit behind his flamboyant exterior.

 Emmanuel Flipo deals since 1996 with topics related to global warming and geo-politics. Through performances realized in the urban setting of big cities (New York, Copenhagen, San José, Toulouse) he creates monumental ephemeral art works where elements and natural energies become in turn the protagonists of the creation.

 This art work with its urban proportions takes a geographical dimension where aerial and terrestrial photographs give the public an idea of the different scales used. As a sacrifice to heaven, this ephemeral art work will continue to exist thanks to these pictures taken from the sky.

 From aleatoric to intuitive shapes

Using the perpetual variables of time and space, his compositions depend on their context of creation. In that dimension of instant, the shape materializes according to the laws of physics. A witness of his time, Emmanuel Flipo draws on the ground stylized cartographies of the world using pigments thrown into the wind. Through these aleatoric compositions, where expansions and concentrations follow each other, the artist lets himself be guided by the spontaneity of the creative gesture. Desired or accidental, these intuitive shapes remind us of his interpretation of the “geo-poetry” concept (initiated by Kenneth White); a kind of experimental and sensitive geography where territoriality and frontiers are out of date notions.

 Instant as a context of creation

Far from any sophistication or aesthetisation, these creations emphasize the importance of simplicity, of pure gesture and give the predominant role to the Instant, where the creation and perception contexts mix together to reach direct experience. The performance cannot be without the public. Present during the creation process, the audience can experience the art work. Using easily recognizable universal graphic patterns helps plunging the spectator into a universe of familiar signs in order to touch even the less initiated persons.

 Ephemeral compositions presented to the sky

Symbolic of transformations, of natural cycles of evolution, of the action of human factors and the way they interact, this set of shapes full of meaning and ritual gestures induces a spiritual preoccupation that refers to deep beliefs of the individual. Similar to mandalas developped in bouddhist and hindouist cultures, these ephemeral postcards post themselves as a sacrifice presented to the sky, they give back to nature what it gives us: sand, snow, natural pigments.

Seen from the sky in their entirety, these creations make sense by replacing man at the center of this macrocosm, and reaffirming the fragility and the limits of his existence.