Yannick Fournié was born in 1972 in the South of France. After enrolling at the École des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, he eventually decided to join the army. His quest for identity, and the lack of a military father absent from his life, compelled him to enrol in the parachute regiment. He stayed there for three years. This experience, although emotionally very powerful, only partially fulfilled his expectations. Taken with freedom and in search of new experiences, he pursued a career in sport. In 2010, he eventually gave in to the nagging and unappeased need to paint. Twenty years of an intensely lived life were required to wean him off his quest for meaning. For three years, alone in front of the canvas in his studio, Yannick Fournié has uncompromisingly painted subjects that appeal to him, worlds into which he injects strength and inwardness. “In a little Mexican town, as a good tourist, I have been the evening spectator of a wrestling match with bodybuilders “ luchadores” , flowing, shouting out, making the show in their costume behind their multicolored mask. The day after , in a local supermarket, I found myself face to face with one of the two Wrestlers that I had seen the day before. This meeting seemed to me surrealist because this one who was dressed in normal clothes similar to mine, still wore his wrestling mask of the previous day. He was shopping ,as me, with in his shopping bag all the trite things of any person.The local fans were enthused around him in the store shelves, asking him for autographs and photos close to him. The magic of the mask still always operated, and the toilet paper in his shopping bag didn’t hurt not at all his prestige and his fame. He was a great local hero. ” The creating work around Mexican Wrestling masks arose from this unexpected meeting, from this contrast between ordinary individual with the extraordinary and popular symbol .Without being a Mexican wrestling fan, Yannick Fournié use those masks as graphic and colored metaphor : Mask are the representation of the individual in the society. In his paintings , the artist puts a mask in everyday life acts , and submit us a reflection: What mask do we put on to exist or to be recognized in our society? Does it allow to hide what we really are or to bring to light us a little more?
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