ARTI’VIEW by ARCHES® Éric Fourmestraux: an artistic journey between inspiration and tributes
What technique(s) do you use?
What counts for me is not so much technique as the message. So I don’t favour any particular technique. I started presenting my work at a solo exhibition at the Galerie Schumm-Braunstein in Paris in 2013 with engravings and drawings. But I am also able to work in other media – sculpture, photography, sound, installation. Each idea leads to another, and I don’t limit myself to a tool, or material…
© Éric Fourmestraux. Portrait.
In a few words, how would you describe your art?
The art of the encounter! Or more precisely: I have always kept everything, or practically everything. I salvage, dig out, accumulate, pile up all sorts of objects that become an integral part of my life. Finds that have been discarded or fragments of nature, they punctuate my history without ever being classified or catalogued. These “treasures”, which I lovingly hoard, sometimes wait for years before popping back into mind to become, one day, a source for my creativity.
It is sometimes just a word, a sentence, an expression… a discovery made incidentally when I’m out and about, which can give rise to the beginnings of a work.
As well as a phrase I might play around with or an object that I might print out, it can also be a person or a memory, memory of an artist or one of their works which fuels my work. An attempt to pay tribute to someone.
Whether it’s something intimate or something more along the lines of collective history, a soul starts to emerge. What I do is delicately unravel the thread with a gentle form of emotion – out of a fear of breaking it – until it becomes the main thread running through my thinking.
It is these encounters, whether chance or engineered, that are the very essence of my work.
What are the subjects that inspire you?
Absence, missing people and things, memories. And all of that often comes together in the form of a tribute.
In your opinion, who is the greatest artist of all time? Why?
That’s a complicated question… it depends on where you are coming from.
For his eternal inventiveness, Picasso seems to me to be an important artist. I don’t like all of his work, but he never stopped reinventing himself and pushing back his boundaries, in spite of his great mastery of drawing. But Picasso also seems to me to be a monstrous artist, with regard to his relationships with women.
And while we’re on the subject of women, Louise Bourgeois is one of the greatest artists with her monumental sculptures and installations. And Marina Abramović, for her performance art. But if we are talking about conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp is undeniably the greatest, and I also have a soft spot for Joseph Kosuth.
The artists that inspire me could be Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, Christian Boltanski…
Tell us about a decisive moment in your artistic career (a first memory/a powerful artistic experience/an encounter with a person, a work, etc.)
On 28 January 2013, at Vicq d’Azir primary school in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, where I worked as an art teacher for nine years, during a commemoration of the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on 27 January 1945, I was deeply moved when the surnames, first names and ages of the forty-eight Jewish children deported from the school were read out by one of their old friends from the neighbourhood, Pierre Degenszajn, who was born on 11 January 1931. One of them was his cousin… another was his girlfriend… After I met him, I couldn’t stop thinking that one day I would pay tribute to them, outside of the school context, using the medium of engraving, in the form of an installation.
An exhibition planned to be held in La Celle-Saint-Cloud in 2019 by the association Graver Maintenant, was the trigger I needed. I decided to take the inscription below the commemorative plaque literally: “Lest they never be forgotten”.
In memoriam. Forty-eight Jewish children deported from Vicq d’Azir school in Paris 10th. 2018-2019. Installation with 48 matrices | wooden hangers of various sizes and their images relief-printed onto 250 gsm sheets of Velin BFK Rives® H. 50 x 33 cm attached by mini-bulldog clips – 6 hanging on the wall and 42 suspended from a hanging rail supported by legs made of Ø 30 mm aluminium tube and pipe connectors, H. 145 x L. 350 cm – 48 glass test tubes with cork stoppers containing wood shavings and dust from the hangers on three presentation stands – headphones and a sound file with the voice of Pierre Degenszajn, 87, Yal Rey, 11, and Myriam Anselme, 9.
To listen to the soundtrack of the work:
http://www.eric-fourmestraux.com/videos/eric-fourmestraux-in-memoriam_son.mp3
It was also in the same year, 2013, that Galerie Schumm-Braunstein offered me my first solo exhibition!
What was your first experience of ARCHES® paper?
In 2010 I received the Prix Corot at the 26th Graver Maintenant print fair, the Salon de l’estampe contemporaine in Rueil-Malmaison. The prize included a packet of one hundred sheets of Jésus size (56 x 76 cm) Velin d’ARCHES® paper.
Later on I switched to white Velin BFK Rives®, precisely because I like how white it is!
ARCHES® paper in one word?
Amoureux (amorous, in love)
© Éric Fourmestraux. Les trois graisses# light # regular # bold (tribute to Raphael), 2014, intaglio printing, relief printing, embroidery (without thread) on 250 gsm Velin BFK Rives® paper – size 50 x 32.5 cm
© Éric Fourmestraux. To Marie-Louise BÉGUÉ, née LIGNÈRES (1904-1978), my grandmother, 2012. Grandma’s glove as a matrix and embroidery on 250 gsm Velin d’ARCHES® paper – size 58 x 38 cm
© Éric Fourmestraux. Là, tout n’est qu’amour…, 2021 drypoint, embossing and letter stamps, with two separate matrices, on 250 gsm Velin BFK Rives® paper – size 76 x 58 cm
© Éric Fourmestraux. Une maille à l’endroit, une maille à l’envers, 2020. Letter stamps, intaglio printing and relief printmaking on ecru 250 gsm Velin BFK Rives® paper – size 58 x 76 cm
What are you currently working on?
I am working on the next Graver Maintenant exhibition, entitled Voir Ailleurs, which is due to be held in November and December 2025 at the Fondation Taylor Atelier in Paris. I had the somewhat conceptual idea of finding a point, the geographical centre of the countries with which we have already had exchanges and which we have invited to take part – Quebec, Brazil, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland and, of course, France!
And then, with what’s in the news, an idea struck me – it would be an engraving on Gaza.
A set of GPS coordinates, corresponding to the location of a hospital, and a photo taken on 14 June 2024 in Gaza, showing the medical staff of Al-Ahli Arabi hospital standing and paying tribute to the body of a colleague, a nurse who was killed at the hospital during Israeli bombing of the Shati refugee camp the night before.
After an installation in tribute to deported Jewish children and the Chacun porte sa croix installation made in 2023 thanks to an interior designer friend who became a Carmelite nun, this seems to me to be a logical next step…
Do you have any other projects on the go or planned?
Loads of ideas come to me all the time. They get stored away somewhere in my memory and then resurface without warning.
I don’t know when I will do it, but I would like to do a series on the Douaumont Ossuary near Verdun where I took my pupils and which I returned with my wife to measure the windows through which you can see the bones of all those people who sacrificed their lives, but whose identity we don’t know.
But I would also like to do an ABC of remarkable women, which was the original idea I had before the project turned into an ABC of women authors when the Mouvements gallery and bookshop offered me a solo exhibition.
© Éric Fourmestraux. Écrire, disent-elles vingt-six autrices à ne pas oublier de lire avant de mourir, 2020. Each drawing, portrait or quotation is on a 38 x 28.5 cm sheet of 250 gsm Velin BFK Rives®paper
