“Basically I am looking for the image”: Hervé di Rosa, noble figure of popular art

Interviewer Hervé Di Rosa is a bit like trying to put the fireworks of. Nevertheless, Saint-Louis in a shoe box. However, Very quickly, it overflows and it goes in all directions. Therefore, For 65 years, the Sétois has displayed a popcorn thought and a well-hung language, abundant like his works. Moreover, And like a fireworks, he dazzles and petrol.

It was in the office of the yum (Museum of Modest Arts) that he created 25 years ago in Sète with Bernard Belluc. Similarly, and of which he is president, that the “basically i am looking image”: artist receives us, around a large table full of a joyful bazaar. Similarly, He made a moist heat there, but Di Rosa seems to be kicking royally. Moreover, Smile of dirty kid. For example, malicious look and white hair that refuses to stand alone, he is already telling the why of the how of his disorientation table which he has just inaugurated in Frontignan. “The idea comes from the old guidance tables that were used when we made walks. Moreover, I scored the 14 surrounding villages. Therefore, I would like to make a card of the same kind on all the works that we can see around. Moreover, Me, I liked to be lost before. Moreover, With the GPS it is more possible. Similarly, Today, we need disorientation, that is to say dreams, to invent territories.

This son of an Italian immigrant. Furthermore, a Catalan also chose voluntary exile “basically i am looking image”: for 15 years, at the end of the 1980s. Moreover, From Ghana to Cameroon. Similarly, from Bulgaria to Mexico, he tightened the clamps to sculptors, embroiderers, painters of signs or masters of varnish, accumulating techniques. Meanwhile, In each country a workshop, each meeting a new material to twist in their sauce. Not by folklore but out of love for doing. At Di Rosa, travel form Genesis. “I needed to discover artisanal practices from an African country or Latin America. I learned lots of techniques and made lots of experiments … Basically, I’m looking for the image …”

For ten years. his nomadism has turned to sedentarization in Portugal – never in immobility – charmed by their art of ceramics. “Usually I stay three. four years but there the ceramic project and the work on volumes I like so much that I stayed.” The whole thing is “Live and venture”. It “basically i am looking image”: sounds like a slogan. Living, to feed on your meetings, your modest objects, your popular mythologies. To venture is to refuse all the boundaries between countries, between people, between the arts, to make all the territories. So Di Rosa has lived in the world since he left the modest family apartment flanked on the Sétois. rock. “We lived in the basement because these are buildings built on a slope. When I was little was super shame, it was really very humiliating. I saw it like a kind of cave. except that after you had a balcony, and there you saw the sea, it was really great. On the ground floor there was my grandmother, the first aunt and the second aunt. Father was passionate about hunting. Before Marseille. the Center Pompidou in Paris, the previous year, before consecration and status, there was at the very beginning, the Fine Arts of “basically i am looking image”: Sète which he frequented when he was 10 years old on Wednesday afternoon, with a certain Robert Combas. “I already had a very young plan. I wanted to benefit from a scholarship for the decorative arts of Paris”.

Di Rosa landed in the capital in the 70s, a bloody metal era. It is a joyfully insolent and allergic punk to codes. “At that time, I believed that comics was my territory”. While he is 17 years old. Georges Wolinski accepts one of his projects for his magazine and launched him: “I take you your boards but it will be the first and last time because there are no stories and it is badly drawn. And he says, on the other hand, go see the galleries”. An inaugural lesson and a salutary kick. Painting will be its initial field of action.

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Art anti-snob

With his “basically i am looking image”: friends from the decorative arts, Robert Combas, François Boisrond, Rémi Blanchard they exhibited, in 1981, their intuitive, provocative, exuberant canvases, between cartoon and popular arts with the artist Ben who baptizes their movement: “Free figuration”. “For me these are works of youth but it was extremely important that they arrive at that time. We were fed up with all these conceptual things-surface supports, narrative figuration-that today I appreciate. Finally we are one of the last artistic movements”.

Success came fairly quickly, like meetings. “Inflated in block, in 83, we land in New York. An art critic Nicolas Moufarège falls in love with my work. me, I never knew, he tells me, come there is a guy who bomb, who makes great things. I arrive, it was Keith Haring!” He likes the energy of the big apple. at the bend of a night, shakes the hand of Diana Ross. “I didn’t “basically i am looking image”: dare to kiss him”he laughs.

Di Rosa is the anti-Snob of art. “Well. after entering the Academy of Fine Arts, having exhibited at Pompidou, I find it hard to say that I am not snobbone”. One thing is certain at home, no conceptual show “No speculative economy”. And then “There is the curse of the south. that is to say when you are not a Paris artist, you are a little put aside”it may also help not take the big head. “He is generous, open and curious”adds by passing from TAC to TAC Francoise Adambsaum, the director of yum.

Di Rosa is definitely a singular artist. herald of the joy of life and cantor of modest art: “It is not a movement or a notion but a look at objects that are useless, produced in the most awful conditions of capitalism that manage to contain poetry, magic. Sometimes art, creation “basically i am looking image”: can be at the bottom of the trash”. Well, right now he “Dream of doing a plastic museum to educate people.” Ecolo di Rosa and “Eminently political. But beware, I don’t do message works.” What connects them all to each other is humor. “There is a transmission of positive energies.”That said, recently, someone far from the artistic world launched him: “Your paintings are anxious”. “Sometimes the truth comes out of the mouth of a neophyte”he laugh. We then take ourselves to think otherwise his cyclops characters of the immense mouths, all teeth outside, tangled.