Joris Ghilini, The Art of Deconstruction and Endless Renewal

On the occasion of Fine Art Asia 2023, we’d decided to shed a light on French artist Joris Ghilini whose artworks will be exhibited at the booth of Step Creation Gallery from 5 to 8 October.

Born in 1978 in Marseille, France, Joris Ghilini is a self-taught polyvalent artist, simultaneously painting, sculpting and drawing. Despite growing up in a family dominated by arts and culture – his father was theatre director and concerts organiser – and dreaming to become a painter from an early age, Ghilini never attended art school. Instead, he went to law school, got a degree in immaterial law and new technologies, and worked as an intellectual property advisor for six years. In 2009, he left his job to finally pursue his dream to become an artist.

Joris Ghilini in his studio in Paris

Since his childhood, Ghilini never stopped painting, following a simple principle: “If you want to become a painter, paint”. He never regretted not attending the Beaux-Arts school because it could have distorted his love for art, as he said.

Ghilini found his inspiration in multiple art and cultural movements, such as the French new realists like César, Arman and Martial Raysse, the American pop artists like Andy Warhol or Jasper Jones, the 15th century Dutch painters, the subcultures of heavy metal and skateboarding, as well as artists like Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Steven Parrino, or Sherrie Levine.

Joris Ghilini

As an autodidact, Ghilini has been experimenting constantly, often dissatisfied by his artworks. This experimentation gradually became his art practice – doing and undoing, ripping up, constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing – and the concept of decay became his signature.

Fascinated by palimpsests, these manuscripts on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing, Ghilini has been creating paintings, drawings or sculptures, then altering them and superposing other traces in a never-ending process.

Joris Ghilini, Virgin and The Kid, 2023  

His Virgin and The Kid series is the epitome of his conceptual ideas and art process. Starting by reproducing classical paintings, he is altering them by superposition, fading, scraping, oxidation, even burning. This process can leave the public wondering if the artworks are old paintings altered by time. And this is the very essence of Ghilini to question and represent the passing of time.

In the history of art, painting and representing the Virgin were compulsory and obeying precise codes. Ghilini breaks these codes by damaging his artworks, reassuring the public with familiar paintings but enabling questions and emotions about evolution and time.

Joris Ghilini, Hello Girls, after Roy Lichtenstein, 2023

In his series inspired by famous paintings from American pop artists Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, Ghilini questions collective memory. The same goes with his Air Jordan sculptures series. Ghilini reclaims iconic and popular items and make them evolve by altering or renewing the materials. He is sculpting wood and bronze, he is decaying and oxidising, showing that art, like life, is a perpetual renewal.

Ghilini also retrieves street communication and advertising posters with multiple layers of papers, posters that have been glued on top of each other over time, forming a thick texture. And he is drawing and painting on their surface. Using materials showing signs of time and natural evolution, he diverts these from their original advertising function to create new art expression.

Joris Ghilini in his studio in Paris, 2023

Ghilini has a strong connection with Hong Kong since his first exhibition in 2018, organised by Stéphane Vartanian. He was present at Affordable Art Fair 2023 and his artworks were all sold in a blink.

The city represents the future he was imagining when he was kid and watched the movie Blade Runner. He appreciates the brutalist architecture, the new technologies mixing with obsolete things, showing the passing of time and the evolution.

He is planning to come back in town for Art Central 2024 and Affordable Art Fair 2024, and for a solo exhibition with Step Creation Gallery. In the meantime, his artworks can be seen at Fine Art Asia 2023 until 8 October.