The impressive career of AGNI, teaching for nearly 30 years at the Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design de Genève (formerly Ecole des Beaux-Arts), and leading at the same time the Vaisseau group, - a group of artists with whom he has accomplished many frescoes, both in the Geneva city and around the world - he never ceases to paint.
Constantly questioning the causes of the world, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, he nevertheless accepts the current state of culture admitting that Man needs, in order to act in our reality, an inner representation, somehow imaginary.
AGNI claims that we have access to a part of this inner representation, especially through the similarity, available in each of us. Let's translate this word into German (Gestaltungs Möglichkeit) to show flexibility and availability. AGNI claims that we haven't looked closely enough at this mechanism, called pareilodie (being able to see a dragon in a cloud formation), a power it uses extensively. He also says that we lack instruments to better experiment with this mechanism and he proposes one: the EEPPH (experimentation in polytopic space painted in oil). This somewhat complicated acronym will be explained separately. Moreover, AGNI thinks that given the proximity of death, and given the current mental disorder of our intelligentsia, it is good to transmit what he knows how to do and what he has taught.
He condenses all this into a canvas he calls The Red Wheel, present in the exhibition.
Does AGNI forget the composition that is the sign of a work of art? Not at all! He knows well that any being who wants to move in space must geometrize, mathematize or digitize, go through energy flows driven by nerves. So every living being composes. Why wouldn't the artist compose! It is therefore a vital, necessary fact.
And beauty? Zarathustra and his group pronounced for the first time in our cultural universe the doublet "Life-One". This notion is, in AGNI's opinion, indispensable to the intelligent approach to beauty.
At the age of 17, Toni Meyer, who became Antoine Meyer and then AGNI, painted a canvas after a postcard representing a man and a bird from the garden of delights, unaware that it was a work by Hieronymus Bosch. Fascinated by the compositions of this painter, AGNI immediately became interested in his way of conceiving space and his practice of oil. Because on the one hand with this medium it is easy to generate a Euclidean type space and then within this framework, to "recompose" all the time, for example, by adding flat spatulate colors. But the oil technique also makes it possible to address the impact so important of glazes that Leonardo da Vinci brought to its climax what greatly benefited Hieronymus Bosch. The latter, unlike Leonardo, who understood that things became fascinating by the atmosphere, he focused as a good Nordic, on the magic of objects that are the sure part of our reality. So since this copy of a postcard, AGNI has deepened its knowledge of oil painting and offers the viewer a fascinating exhibition, of incredible richness, full of treasures meticulously composed and executed. Don't miss it!
Antoine Piron and then AGNI lives and works near Aubonne in the canton of Vaud. In 2023,
he is 85 years old. He has been painting since the age of 16 and continues to paint.
He taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva for more than thirty years and founded
the Vaisseau group which has produced more than 300 murals in many countries, such as
Switzerland, Croatia, Serbia, Russia. He has painted murals for the National Library in
St Petersburg, in Arkangelsk in the Gastini Dvor, and in Kaliningrad in the Okéan Museum,
but also in a NATO destroyer passing through the North Seas.
Image on cov er: The satin shoe, oil on wood, 1993 (30x30 cm)
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