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 KARAMAZOV, film) with others students...
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.