In 1989, Philippe R. Berthommier joined the Tours School of Fine Arts; he had just completed training as a ceramic decorator at the Henri Brisson State High School in Vierzon. That same year, the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette hosted the exhibition "The Magicians of the Earth, or How to Move from a World Art to a Global Art" from May 18 to August 14, 1989.
Jean-Hubert Martin invited artists from every continent, destabilizing a contemporary art world exclusively limited to the borders of Europe and North America. Traveling and turning to artists rooted in ancestral cultures, resistant to post-colonialism, fighting against totalitarianism, and above all curious about the emerging global openness. A double taboo was broken: the one according to which contemporary art existed only in the West, and the one that prohibited the exhibition of works from different cultures side by side.
This exhibition has a lasting impact on his relationship with art and the way he questions and opens his artistic practice (essentially pictorial) to a global thought focused on connection. He is interested in the works of Per Kirkeby, Wolgang Laïb, Joseph Beuys, Richard Texier, Anish Kapoor, Guiseppe Pennone and many others; he is passionate about art history.
On November 19, 1997, the great Edouard Glissant published his "treatise on the whole world": "I call the whole world our universe as it changes and endures through exchange and, at the same time, the vision we have of it. The whole world in its physical diversity and in the representations it inspires in us: that we can no longer sing, speak, or work through suffering from our own place without plunging into the imaginary of this totality." Edouard Glissant.
In 2008, Philippe R. Berthommier began a series of exhibitions in Morocco thanks to his meeting with Alain and Maryvone Grunberg, the grand Théâtre Royal to begin with, with monumental formats, his exhibitions will be co-produced with Luc Bonhomme, then his agent. He then met Maha Elmadi, director of the prestigious Dar Bellarj palace, she offered him a six-month carte blanche at the foundation where he invested all the rooms. Four walls coated with tadellakt were built in the courtyard of the majestic Riad which will be engraved by four hands with the visual artist and calligrapher Azziz Bouyabrine. He then met Mouley Youssef el Kafaï, renowned artist in Morocco and founder of the Point on line gallery, who invited him to exhibit in October and November 2009, and invited him to visit him in his studio in the Moroccan countryside. Jean José Rieu, then director of the French Institute in Marrakech, offered him a residency at the prestigious Riad Masson. He stayed there and produced an exhibition entitled "Rumors," which would also be exhibited in Fez. He took advantage of this period to visit southern Morocco and discover the collective granaries of the Atlas Mountains, which had obsessed him since the moving lecture by the great Salima Naji, architect and anthropologist. It was a revelation, and he decided to work on a series of works entitled "granaries."
In 2010, he had a decisive encounter with the paintings of Michel Saint-Lambert, who became his great friend and faithful companion. Born in the slum of Saint-Denis in Reunion Island and a victim of the state scandal called "The Children of Creuse." The great Saint-Lambert built his entire body of work on this resilience; it was a great shock. They then decided to join forces to nurture a work of exchange and openness. Since then, exhibitions and projects have emerged, such as "Babel iconoclaste," an evolving international project presented at the Thomas Master Gallery in Chicago, the Orangerie of the Château de Vendôme, and the Garnier-Delaporte Gallery, in collaboration with Samuel Nissim, David Gista, and Jean-Philippe Mauchien. Numerous group and solo exhibitions in Ukraine, China, Belgium, the United States, and Germany present the painter's works striving for openness. For 30 years, the great thematic families woven by Berthommier have come together to construct an open work producing a heuristic map of poetic relationships nourished by encounters and exchanges.
