Early works

Since the age of 4, Pierre Lamalattie paints and draws every day. His grandmother, Marguerite Juille, gave him the taste for beautiful things and read with him the marvellous Father Beaver (Père Castor) albums. The post-impressionist artist Léo Lotz took him under his wing and helped him progress thanks to numerous painting weekends and nights spent in workshops with a living model. At school, Pierre Lamalattie overcame boredom with a great many drawings and caricatures which create some disturbances.

At the age of 20, painting truly became a means of expression, guided by an often dark inspiration. Some works from this period are joint projects (e.g., literary review, film) with Michel Houellebecq.

This period is marked by the feeling of discovering, before adulthood, the reality of the world, a world of competition, a world where there no place for simple and free happiness, a prosaic and graceless world. Carried by a kind of nostalgia, Pierre Lamalattie begins to look at the passers at great length, waiting for a redeeming face. That generally leads to the nauseating feeling of human ugliness and bestiality; hence a number of grotesque drawings of faces, agglomerated in bunches or floods. The intuition that the taste for sublime leads to the inextricable is expressed in faces captive of tangled up hair or interlaced branches. The desire to flee this world inspires the depiction of burials. The quasi-christic divinity of the buried contrasts with the mediocrity of the spectators. Dark faces with Beethoven-like hairstyles incarnate Lamalettie's attraction for the romantic figure of the creator. Various evocations of the black cotton soil, telluric forces and alchemical transformations, point to a kind of fertility of the depths. Faces of merry destructors and cold architects reflect a desire for rupture and the inclination to build something strange and unknown. Finally various works are marked by an atmosphere of consolation, a diluted and autumnal tone. They incarnate the feeling that only the tenuous and fugacious pleasures of remembrance and representation really exist and offer the prospect for a slow poetic capitalisation.