Biography

Jean-Paul Agosti, born in Paris on 17 Au­gust 1948, son of Paul and Jeanne Fac­chetti, showed early signs of an artis­tic vo­ca­tion. He was en­rolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Across the street from the Fac­chetti Stu­dio, rue de Lille. He stud­ied under the painter André Chastel, an artist of the Paris School, showed an in­terest in litho­graphy while he was as­sist­ing his father in his art gal­lery.

At that time Agosti’s friends in­clude such artists as Phil­ippe Stark, Gérard Garouste and Fas­si­anos. He was very close to his younger brother Yves, also an artist, who showed real prom­ise in the fields of pho­to­graphy and music. Un­for­tu­nately, this close re­la­tion­ship was broken off by Yves’ ac­ci­dental death in 1970. Agosti chose to de­voted him­self to paint­ing in 1974, at the time when his father’s gal­lery moved to the rue des Saints-Pères.

Paul Fac­chetti had de­cided to have the new gal­lery re­fur­bished and hired the ar­chi­tect Carlo Scarpa, who im­ple­men­ted an am­bi­tious pro­gram of works which were to take two years and yiel­ded a spa­cious gal­lery fit­ted in marble and alu­minium.

At that time Agosti was in­ter­ested in land­scape garden­ing and in the prob­lems of lim­its in space that are in­her­ent to this dis­cip­line. Agosti was al­ways fas­cin­ated by nature, a trait the may well hark back to his chil­hood when the fam­ily would go to the coun­try to visit his grand-par­ents in Bièvre and in the city of Vitré in Brit­tany, the birth­place,  of Jeanne Vétillard, his mother. In 1975 he had an ex­hib­i­tion en­titled Ob­jets d’es­pace, in the Rae­ber Gal­lery in Lu­cerne, Switzer­land, with his first cata­logue pre­faced by Richard Ducous­set : “The idea of an ob­ject ex­ists. Pure and per­fect.

The ob­ject it­self ex­ists and un­folds in space. It’s rep­res­ent­a­tion ex­ists on can­vas or paper – this is the third stage of the ob­ject. The subtle dif­fer­ences between the three stages in­sinu­ate them­selves and pro­ject us from the image to the ima­gin­ary. This con­fuses the in­tel­lect and en­rich the po­etic mind”.

At the out­set he drew highly frag­men­ted, highly or­ganic sub­jects, using india ink and re­strict­ing him­self to black and white. this form ten­ded to sug­gest the pro­lif­er­a­tion of an ori­ginal chaos and con­sti­tuted what he would later refer to, in terms bor­rowed from the idiom of al­chemy, as his opus nigredo or “black work”. in 1976, he left paris and settled in the small town of Gif-sur-Yvette within the derel­ict walls of an an­cient abbey, which had been en­dowed with a very fine garden. this he set out to paint in all hu­mil­ity. he turned to wa­ter­color after hav­ing pro­duced a con­sid­er­able num­ber of works in gou­ache: “Wa­ter­col­or is not, as some may be in­clined to think, a some­what in­ferior tech­nique which artists prac­tice for fu­tile motives. in my view, a it is no longer a sec­ond­ary ob­ject, a mere sketch or re­flec­tion of some finer work. Wa­ter­color has be­come my great ad­ven­ture. »

An ad­ven­ture in the prac­tical realm, which, like all seem­ingly simple un­der­tak­ings, turns out to be highly com­plex as soon as one at­tempts to mas­ter its ef­fects. the best com­par­ison is provided by music where forms are re­peated over and over until mas­tery is achieved”. Paul Fac­chetti de­cided to ex­hibit Agosti’s work in 1978, just one year after he had had his one-man show in the Martha Jack­son gal­lery in new york.

At that time, only con­cep­tual works were being dis­played in gal­ler­ies and Agosti’s wa­ter­col­ors were ut­terly alien to this sort of work. the ex­hib­i­tion the gar­dens of gif’ found an audi­ence and a crit­ical fol­low­ing in the shape of sever­tal art­icles, in­clud­ing one by Olivier Cena: “through the simple and nat­ural beauty of the sub­ject and through the trans­par­ency of his col­ors, Agosti man­ages to ex­press all the fresh­ness and po­etry of a world which has been lost forever”. This un­usual view of a garden hints at the com­plex­ity of a world that lies bey­ond the sim­pli­city of mere ap­pear­ance that still re­mains to be per­ceived.

To those who see things rightly, a single space holds out sev­eral levels of real­ity that need to be dis­covered. In such works as Écrit­ure de la haie, Six carrés et le ciel or Mouve­ments gris, two graphic states lead us down a po­etic trail where it soon be­comes ap­par­ent that we are in pres­ence of a “here and now” bit also of an “else­where”. In 1980, Fac­chetti de­cided to ex­hibit Agosti’s work at the fiac (the in­ter­na­tional fair of con­tem­por­ary art, in paris) with the marked in­ten­tion of re­turn­ing to the ori­gins of paint­ing in op­pos­i­tion with the reign­ing con­fu­sion of genres. the al­ex­an­der iolas gal­lery in new york took an in­terest in his work and offered to dis­play his work under the title gen­esis, land­scape, fractals.

After his jardin de gif ex­hib­i­tion, Agosti felt a def­in­ite need to re­turn to a true sub­ject of nature. this led a group of works en­titled mares et rochers (ponds and rocks). long walks in the fon­tainebleau forest with the painter Robert Ladou, provided an ex­cep­tional op­por­tun­ity to ob­serve nature at close range and in its full or­ganic scope: “in my mares et rochers series, i was con­fron­ted with a nat­ural ob­ject that was un­en­cumbered with any human in­ter­pret­a­tion, dir­ectly en­gaged in its own phys­ical laws, its pro­cesses of erosion, its struggle for light. this yiel­ded a form of geo­metry quite alien to the bi­d­i­men­tional square of the gar­dens; a geo­metry com­posed of sep­ar­ate lay­ers in space, and thus a fractal geo­metry with all the im­plic­a­tions of scale”.

Agosti’s en­counter with the pol­ish math­em­atician Benoît Man­del­brot and his dis­cov­ery of fractal thought turned out to be a de­cis­ive mo­ment. Man­del­brot was the first to allow the pub­lic to visu­al­ise com­pu­ter­ized fractal im­agery. Agosti met him thanks to his friend

The phys­i­cist and chem­ist Alain le Méhauté on the oc­ca­sion of a lec­ture de­livered by the philo­sopher michel serres  in the pal­ais de la découverte in paris. Man­del­broit’s sci­entific ap­proach for­ti­fied him in his per­sonal ap­proach and en­riched his un­der­stand­ing of struc­ture. Agosti real­ized that, thanks to their in­stru­ments, sci­ent­ists man­age to form­al­ise the very same as­pects of nature that he had touched upon in­tu­it­ively in his art. but the as­pect that most de­f­in­itely in­ter­ested him resided in the fact that fractal though marked a break with the idea of a eu­c­lidian space which had served to co­dify the image, but also with the no­tion of serial pro­duc­tion.

This led him to de­vise an ar­bor­es­cence which al­lowed the struc­ture of the work to re­flect de­tails which he deemed es­sen­tial. such an ap­proach offered a model of real­ity de­vised by means of a much subtler and more pre­cise in­stru­ment than any he had formerly had at his dis­posal. at that same time, an­other artist, Jean Le­tourneur, had come to the same con­clu­sion. this meant that there was not merely a fractal art but a fractal re­volu­tion of the mind in which sci­ent­ists and artists stood side by side.

Agosti con­tin­ued to deal with the same sub­jects there­after, without sur­ren­der­ing to the se­duc­tions of the serial image. he de­pic­ted the edge of a river or pond, where earth and water mingle and where sky and  trees are re­flec­ted in turn. on his baths of apollo, he es­tab­lished a cor­res­pond­ence with the in­fin­ity of mir­rors so char­ac­ter­istic of the aes­thet­ics and the sym­bol­ism of ver­sailles. in his wa­ter­col­ors he pa­tiently de­scribed the in­terior of a sphere, a mi­cro­cosm in which the four ele­ments, of fire, air, water and earth are mingled. Agosti’s main am­bi­tion is to be a wit­ness whose work trans­mits cer­tain ac­quis­i­tions of the hu­man­istic tra­di­tion. in doing so, he man­ages to cre­ate a hy­per­bolic space in which a same poly­chrome image is re­peated on dif­fer­ent scales in which he re­sorts to the mono­chrome and uses on a primary col­ors to un­fold a con­stantly de­vel­op­ing ar­bor­es­cent space. this echoes the baroque no­tion of the mise en abyss of an image  [the french term of mise en abyss des­ig­nates an ef­fect also known as the droste ef­fect. this is the visual ex­per­i­ence of stand­ing between two mir­rors and dis­cov­er­ing an in­fin­ite re­pro­duc­tion of one’s own re­flex­ion] and the or­der­ing of an ori­ginal chaos.

”what can be said in re­gard to what lies out­side frame”, Agosti asks, “what lies bey­ond the frayed edges of the liv­ing hedge? can that space be ap­pre­hen­ded, what might that other locus be, i ask you?”. this de­term­in­a­tion to bring order into the pro­lif­er­a­tion of nature is typ­ical of Agosti’s work, but also a yearn­ing to reach bey­ond it. “the para­dox be­comes ap­par­ent when the work is done: it is not longer part of my­self, yet it re­mains thor­oughly mine, with all those in­flec­tions, the choice of forms, the co­he­sion and the frac­tures, the stresses and com­pres­sions of every kind, the up­roar and the si­lences ; all that no longer seems to be­long to me,. un­less this merely mean that it has not yet be­come mine”.

But Agosti is not just an artist who hap­pens to work with fractals, nor is he in any way in­clined to allow his work to be iden­ti­fied with this concept. this is what promp­ted him to mark his dif­fer­ence from the in­ter­na­tional group which termed it­self the fractal­ists and to clar­ity his stand in a let­ter writ­ten in 1997, de­clin­ing an in­vit­a­tion to par­ti­cip­ate in a group show at pur­chase col­lege in New York: “My chief re­ser­va­tion re­gard­ing the work of these artists, is the fol­low­ing: to my know­ledge none of them have mod­i­fied the struc­ture of their work or in­deed the local-global re­la­tion­ship as i have done. none has chosen to re­nounce what i call “séri­al­ism” (the re­pe­ti­tion of the same). This holds ser­i­ous con­sequences for the so-called fractal­ists and it is suf­fi­cient for me not to feel any af­fin­ity with this “im­pos­ture””.

This at­temp­ted sim­pli­fic­a­tion goes agains Agosti’s aes­thetic ap­proach which is both more thought­ful and more at­tached to the com­plex­ity of the sym­bolic im­plic­a­tions which he strives to de­velop in ref­er­ence to the labyrinth or to the tree of the sephiroth for in­stance. in this pro­cess each frag­ment only ex­ists through the re­la­tion­ship it es­tab­lishes with the whole. re­luct­ant to any re­duc­tion to unity, the frag­ment, in its fractal in­com­plete­ness, holds a prom­ise re­gard­ing the fu­ture and pos­sibly of a uto­pian res­tor­a­tion.

In re­gard to the concept of time, Agosti has con­stantly sought to re­view the rel­ev­ant myths and he en­joys work­ing on the memory traces in­her­ent to any site. this was in­deed the sub­ject of a trav­el­ling ex­hib­i­tion or­gan­ised in ger­many by Marie-Louise Sr­ing in 1985, with the sup­port of the afaa (as­so­ci­ation française d’ac­tion artistique), en­titled gechichte als wider­stand, “his­tory as res­ist­ance”. in 1988 he also showed his work in Ar­lette Gi­maray’s Gal­ler under the title, tables d’ori­ents – or table of bear­ings, an ap­prox­im­a­tion of the term which serves to des­ig­nate what is more pro­sa­ic­ally known in eng­lish as a “view­point in­dic­ator”. on this oc­ca­sion he presen­ted a num­ber of short texts touch­ing upon the aes­thetic pref­er­ences that de­term­ine his ori­ent­a­tion. taken to­gether, nature, its frac­tion­at­ing, its pro­lif­er­a­tion and the re­it­er­a­tion of a sem­inal image trans­posed into dif­fer­ent scales open the way to such very large paint­ings as the ten by three meters fresco ex­ecuted for the College André Malraux in Paron (1984). his friend­ship with the sci­ent­ist alain le Méhauté led to an artistic pro­ject for the in­sti­tut supérieur des matériaux du mans, which presen­ted Agosti’s work in the full­ness of its ar­chi­tec­tural and plastic scope. “bey­ond their re­spect­ive idioms, both artists strove to achieve beauty.

in Agosti’s sight this meant the reson­nance of col­ors and the har­mont of forms. in the sight of le Méhauté, it had an ab­stract qual­ity, rest­ing upon the match­ing of the math­em­at­ical in­stru­ment and its ob­ject, com­plex and com­pos­ite, the mi­cro­scopic im­ages pro­duced by the math­em­at­ical tool dis­play a strange af­fin­ity with the nat­ural forms mag­ni­fied by the former”. art and the sci­ences are thus in­tim­ately bound to­gether. Agosti is non­ethe­less at pains to point out that no plastic or aes­thetic link is to be sought between a com­pu­ter­ized fractal im­ages and his own art. the meta­phor­ical de­velopment of ar­bor­es­cent im­ages touch­ing upon the in­fin­ite range of pos­sib­il­it­ies in the field of rep­res­ent­a­tion, hinges upon this point of ten­sion between any given de­tail and the glob­al­ity of space.

As Maïthé Valles-Bled, then cur­ator of the musée des beaux-arts de chartres points out: « You al­ways find three phases in Agosti’s ap­proach to nature, and in each of them he elab­or­ates an evolving sys­tem which tends to­wards in­creas­ing com­plex­ity. the first of these is wa­ter­color, which of­fers a re­l­at­ively sim­pli­fied frame of rep­res­ent­a­tion of the land­scape; next comes the draw­ing, which fur­ther elab­or­ates on the de­vel­op­ment of the sys­tem. and out of these two the painted work fi­nally emerges. this paint­ing, which can be more or less ab­stract, now iso­morphic, now cos­mo­lo­gical, al­ways re­mains con­nec­ted to what pre­ceded it, through the very pro­cess of its gen­er­a­tion” from his many travels, par­tic­u­larly to japan, and from the vari­ous gar­dens he then dis­covered,- such as the Ryôan in Kyoto – Agosti has fur­ther learned to define the bounds of the nat­ural space of his ima­gin­a­tion, which al­ways dis­plays af­fin­it­ies with the french garden.

He shares this love of gar­dens with his friend the poet Salah Stétié who sees in them “areas of os­mosis, ana­morphos­is and metamorph­osis. in these gar­dens, through the mi­ra­cu­lous power of the heightened song, a per­fect face takes form some­what being the veil of light, the face of a man or of a god, per­haps that of orph­eus him­self… the greatest merit of this face is no doubt that it re­mains in­vis­ible, thus draw­ing all the vis­ible to it­self and of­fer­ing it up” 11 Agosti’s work is a re­sponse to a suc­ces­sion of meta­morph­oses in space and time, by which the her­it­age of former times, in a po­etic re­birth, once more takes shape. this is ap­par­ent in his suite d’hermès which was ex­hib­ited at the Thessa Her­old gal­lery in 1996, or in his jardin hiéro­glyph­ique, shown in the musée Saint Roch in Is­soudun in 1998.