Philippe Borderieux, born in Bourges and Paris.
After studying art and teaching in higher education, he ended his career at the Manufacture des Gobelins / Mobilier National after teaching drawing and painting at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Caen. Philippe Borderieux pursued his career as an artist supported by institutions and galleries that allowed him to build a strong and sensitive body of work linking drawing, painting and ceramics, a medium that plays an important role in his recent creation. Currently, a public commission from the Manufacture de Gobelins will give us the opportunity to see the creation of two benches in "Savonnerie velours" based on the painter's cartoons. Present in Paris, Brussels and New York, Philippe Borderieux continues his work by favoring an alternation of places that nourish him, in particular with Naples, but also Palermo. Ceramics, song, line, gesture and color are the constituents of his practice, involuntarily animated by the voices of the past. Naples is his crucible, an archaeology of the "Grand Tour" that he takes on for his own. The lemon is the emblem of this Amalfi Coast and of Sicily; he likes to fall asleep in the shade of the lemon trees, near the roses, which agree to accomplish the miracle of "the Great Beauty." He creates maps, pavements, wanderings - of which we perceive only fragments, a mise en abyme of buried Memories. The theme of the Centaurs and representations of symbolic battles and postures, show again the proximity of his favorite places: moments of Lives, of wanderings, or of abandonments. These are forgotten sketches for frescoes, representations of lost gardens. It is therefore a thread both tenuous and fragile for a labyrinth connecting past and present, from which Philippe Borderieux found his path.

AMALFI

Black with suffocating ashes
Black with dramas and erasures
the figures of this tragedy attempt
to leave their imprints fixed
on the frescoes of these dislocated walls.

The ashes laid like a shroud,
centuries-old deposits that slow down the
resurrection of this tragedy;
made of burning stones,
of ink smoke
and death.

The shorthand of these ancient rituals
remain enigmas, distorted readings
by forgetting, the disenchantment with these tales
mythological ones who seek to be reborn in the thickness of these
landfills.

November 2024