Very young, Christophe Marion spends time drawing. as a teenager an illness kept him cloistered for a year and he took the opportunity to draw everything he saw daily. He begins an apprenticeship at the small college school where one of his teachers is Bernard Rouyard, then at the beaux-arts school in Lyon and finally at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg where he obtained a DNSEP in Art section. In 1990, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting.
The strength of his drawing requires color to be introduced discreetly first into his paintings.
His first painted works are still lifes, kitchen or workshop corners treated in the gray scale. Little by little his paintings take on color.
The artist does not confine himself to one type of subject, but in the diversity of his paintings we can see a constant desire to treat reality as chance presents it to us.
Thus Christophe Marion paints the corner of a room as well as the backs of cut chairs appear, pieces of things that always end up finding on the canvas a formal and colorful order that justifies their sectioning, as a workshop all empty or a large wardrobe, a fireplace, the pale rectangle of an opening are the only company of an isolated chair.
Today, his compositions are the subject of series, in search of a refined balance between form and color, light and matter.
After an in-depth analysis, the tables are simplified to leave room for only the part of the emotion received at a specific moment.
Pierre Guion.
Biography
Born April 22, 1971 in Lyon - Lives and works in Lyon.
Training :
From 1987 to 1997 Lyon preparatory art school with Bernard Rouyard,
National School of Beaux-Arts of Lyon then National School of
Strasbourg Atelier Wladimir Skoda and Franck Wolfhart.
Exhibitions
1998 Galerie de la Grande Masse des Beaux Arts – Paris 6
1999 Galerie L’Eau Forte – Bordeaux
2000 Galerie de la Grande Masse des Beaux Arts – Paris 6
2001 Invitation Mairie de Paris « Nuit de la poésie » Place St Sulpice – Paris 6
Villa Bini – Lyon 9
2002 Galerie de la Grande Masse des Beaux Arts – Paris 6
Galerie Peinture Fraîche – Paris 7
2003 Fondation Boiron – Ste Foy et Messimy.
Château St Bernard à Anse.
Pensionnaire à la Fondation Robert Laurent Vibert au Château de Lourmarin (Vaucluse).
Galerie de la Grande Masse des Beaux Arts – Paris 6
2004 Galerie Peinture Fraîche – Paris 7
Galerie Feille – Pezenas.
2005 Château de Lourmarin
Galerie de la Grande Masse des Beaux Arts – Paris 6
Galerie Bachs Scherrer – Caluire
2006 Galerie Toho Art Corporation – Tokyo – Japon.
Galerie Peinture Fraîche – Paris 7
Biennale Européenne de Beaumesnil – 1 er prix de peinture.
2007 Espace Pierre Cardin – Paris 8
Galerie Toho Art Corporation – Nagoya – Japon.
Hôtel particulier Mezzara – Paris 16
2008 Galerie Tableau D’honneur St Cloud
2009 Galerie Dury Morel – Lyon 2
Galerie Tableau D’honneur – St Cloud
2010 Musée des Granges de Servette – Chens-sur-Léman
Galerie Memory Lane – Ambérieu-en-Bugey
2011 Galerie Tableau D’Honneur – St Cloud
2012 Galerie Dury Morel – Lyon 2
2013 Château des Allymes – Ambérieu-en-Bugey
Rétrospective 1997 – 2013 Orangerie du sénat – Paris 6
2014 Galerie Tableau D’honneur – St Cloud
2016 Galerie Tableau D’honneur – St Cloud
2017 Galerie Huit Yv – Lyon 3
2018 Rétrospective Fondation La Ruche-Seydoux – Paris 15
2019 Château de Rochebonne avec la Galerie Jean Louis Mandon – Lyon 2
2020 Château de Rochebonne avec la Galerie Jean Louis Mandon – Lyon 2
Introductory text for the Exhibition - Retrospective "Poetic spaces"
50 works from 1997 to the present day, Senate Orangery, Luxembourg Gardens,
In the privacy of the threshold,
Who, taking a somewhat hasty first glance at Christophe Marion's painting, would not give in to the lazy temptation to isolate it in a prosaic perception, thus missing the pictorial phenomenon?
That of the rhythm induced by the omnipresence of thresholds, by the mise en abyme of verticals, by light energy creating space.
However, it is both the representative external dimension and the rhythmic internal dimension that are at work in his paintings.
The painter invites us to enter the privacy of his home, his studio. Chairs and sofas are like a constantly renewed invitation to sit there for the time of a timeless period, to soak up its atmosphere, make us aware of its poetics of color, participate in the composition of the painting, a little falsely distinct way in the painting "La Rêverie".
Everything happens as if Christophe Marion invited us into the privacy of his world the better to invite us to escape it through reverie, as if he always left open a reverie of elsewhere. Thus the space of intimacy is never closed in on itself in a single protective tranquility: it unfolds over something external, it incites us relentlessly to cross thresholds, to cross reflections, on a journey of the imagination.
Doors and windows, casings and embrasures in a row, reflective mirrors and multiplied virtual perspectives create a dynamic of open and closed from inside and outside, here and there, visible and invisible. The painter brings up what Bachelard calls “this equivocal space” or “the spirit has lost its geometric part and the soul floats”, where man becomes this “half-open being”, then placed in an in-between symbolic oblivious to gravity, conducive to the emergence of a creative rhythm.
In the space that is his on a daily basis, Christophe Marion creates a dialogue between vertical and diagonal, invents almost vertiginous vanishing lines, reveals backgrounds surprisingly evocative of Rothko's paintings in the “Vertical Workshop”, creates atmospheres with the Hopper or the very particular appearance of yellow creates a feeling of disturbing strangeness in “The workshop with the isolated chair”, summons the outside world in a simple reflection, in the rendering of an ephemeral transparency, infuses a luminous energy which opens the space and makes an infinite breathing palpable, what seemed figurative and as if frozen comes to life, takes on abstraction, abstraction in the sense that Maldiney understands it; "This power of interiority and of going beyond the visual plane without which there is no art (Gaze, Speech, Space). Thus Christophe Marion can entitle one of his paintings Abstract Chair. In all of his work, the painter invites us to see beyond the object itself, beyond the everyday in what it might have that is limited. Here we are then at the meeting of a subjectivity and an emotional dynamic, at the meeting of an intimate imagination which enlarges an entire universe; here we are faced with an aesthetic experience that comes towards us and opens us to a space of call.
Dr Pascale Drouet
Professor of British literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
President of the Scientific Expertise Commission,
Director of Shakespeare Online Notebooks in the making.
