Vicario (1950)

Vicario's pieces of art

Catherine Pennec:

Your artistic career spans several decades, in France and abroad. With hindsight, how do you view this trajectory today?

 Vicario:

The message seems increasingly clear to me: I believe that, gradually, I am moving towards the essential. What matters is what we have to say and not how to say it... Technique is only the medium.

Catherine Pennec:

Was there a founding moment, an inspiration, that led you to such an engaged and ongoing artistic practice since the late 1970s?

Vicario:

After my artistic studies, it took me a while to find my expression. We all graduate from art schools with a very good level; the difficulty is differentiating ourselves and maintaining our own approach: for me, the human body, the nude.

Catherine Pennec:

Your work is often described as unclassifiable, crossed by multiple techniques—painting, drawing, collage, burning... Is this diversity an inner necessity, a form of freedom?

Vicario:

The training as an arts teacher allowed me to work and have my students work with different techniques. Then you have to find your personal language, your expression that is most in tune with your personality. My choice can be very varied, depending on the topic addressed. 

Catherine Pennec:

You revisit both mythological figures and anonymous or more intimate scenes. What connects these different sources of inspiration in your work?

Vicario:

I like to challenge myself: starting from the History of Art, its iconic images and revisiting them. I bring my vision, my emotion, and make quotes my own in Art. I place my models on the same level as a Roman emperor or a deity, giving them equal value, without any hierarchy.

Catherine Pennec:

Fire occupies a unique place in your practice, notably through burning. How did this technique become obvious to you, and what does it allow you to express that other mediums do not?

Vicario:

It is by rereading a memoir of a colleague on "The representation of fire and flame from the Middle Ages to our days" that I realized that I had never worked on this theme... So I looked into how I could exploit this field in a very personal way. Fire is very often involved in my artistic approach. It’s an essential element that I can’t control completely. I never know in advance, the final result. He picks up my drawing, transforms it and engraves it forever on the canvas.

Catherine Pennec:

In your burned works, the figures appear both revealed and fragmented, as if suspended between disappearance and presence. What place do you give to the viewer in this reconstruction of the image?

Vicario:

The visitor can project himself into my story, revealed on the canvas, appropriate it and find in his experience or imagination his emotions and a part of his history.

Catherine Pennec:

Have your training in decorative arts and your teaching experience influenced the way you approach creation today?

Vicario:

I realized that there were a thousand possible and conceivable answers to a proposed theme. Each student has multiple creative answers. Art is multiple and necessary for everyone. It’s up to everyone to find their way of expression.

Catherine Pennec:

As part of the exhibition "En découdre", you are working on old rags, supports loaded with a domestic and intimate memory. What led you to this textile material?

Vicario:

My old kitchen towels are loaded with emotions, memories, and life. Collected from my grandparents, with traces of the past, stains, tears, embroidered initials, they made up the trousseau, an essential element before the wedding. They represent a link between the past and the present, the banal and the exceptional.

Catherine Pennec:

These textiles become, under your gesture, projection surfaces for the body, especially through your nudes. How are the body, memory, and tissue articulated in this series?

Vicario:

These ancient, very rough kitchen towels were made of linen and cotton like our artists' canvases today. By diverting these rags from their daily function to make them a support for works of art, I value them and give them a new function, from an object of labor to a poetic and evasion object.

Catherine Pennec:

Here you are interacting with artists whose practices are very different—embroidery with Lou Salamon, photography with Stefano Bianchi, glass with Théo Beaumont. How do you perceive this play of correspondences and contrasts around textiles?

Vicario:

The artists of the exhibition "En découdre" certainly have different concerns and diverse means of expression; the search for different materials and techniques, diverted from their primary function seems to be the link between our common expressions. We bring our personal and singular vision to harmless materials. *

Catherine Pennec:

Your work oscillates between sensuality, poetry and a certain form of tension. Is this a way for you to question our relationship with the body and memory?

Vicario:

In every work, the body is present. The body expresses itself, it speaks to me. It’s up to me to know how to observe it, understand it, and highlight it. Everything is there, the questions and answers are open. He reveals to me what he has undergone, the outrages of time and life. All the same but all different.

Catherine Pennec:

To conclude, what would you like the visitor to remember—or feel—by discovering your works in this exhibition?

Vicario:

I hope that the visitor does not remain indifferent to my creations, that he lets his imagination take possession of the work. Art allows for this discovery: respecting differences, it seems to me that we must accept a certain imperfection of bodies, beings, nature, and life, play on our hearts and not cheat.