Philippe Fangeaux

Philippe Fangeaux assembles what should be mutually exclusive elements of reality. He thus invites us to a reading of expressive shocks and brutal articulations which terminate by determining the consequences of a disturbed reality that can't be firmly grasped, that constantly escapes us while allowing itself to be strangely pursued. His painting gives off an intoxicating effect.
The imaginary gets bogged down in the real, airs it out, irrigates it, communicates a part of its instability. A constant flow is created from one to the other, and something like a confusion stripped of all weight. These two poles produce flashes of stories that never cease to overlap, soliciting us there where propositions and mysteries summon and await us, not in the sense of a trap or a bifurcation, but like a path branching out under the sway of multiple forces whose stakes and motivations thwart our understanding from the start.
Philippe Fangeaux thus triggers a mechanism for staging fictitious models and autobiographies that are an active part of this same effervesence, for they are constantly reworked by a need for confrontations. What he seeks to accomplish is something like an untiringly repeated dive into this play of mirrors and echoes, so as to bring back all that can still produce an image. His painting thus becomes plural, an entity of constituent elements that don't bond, that differ without cancelling one another out and without subordinating themselves to one another, inscribing the possibility of a whole whose parts coexist through their differences in a positive incompatibility. It comes and goes, turns against itself, and seeks less to advance towards a clear and definitive conclusion than to allow this unknown center's existence to surface.

Didier Arnaudet, excerpt from the catalog abbadia Philippe Fangeaux, Le Carré Bonnat - Bayonne, 2002