“TOTEMS À CIEL OUVERT”
BY JULIEN MARINETTI
FROM 19th MAY TO 4th OCTOBER 2022
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This summer, the city of Arcachon welcomes the exhibition “TOTEMS À CIEL OUVERT” with 3 monumental artworks on its famous Sea Front by the artist
Julien Marinetti
The Mayor Yves Foulon will inaugurate the exhibition in the presence of the artist
Thursday 19 May from 6pm (French Time)
on the Place Thiers
Three monumental sculptures in bronze, engraved and then painted by the artist will be exhibited
on the city’s waterfront: PÂ LE PANDA, DOGGY JOHN & TEDDY BEAR
Julien Marinetti’s works have conquered the world.
Mysterious, adventurous and intense, the artist has never stopped traveling with his creations. Welcomed in the four corners of the world, this tireless artist has made it a habit to find new places to experiment with his art.
At the initiative of Galeries Bartoux and supported by the mayor of Arcachon, the artist Julien Marinetti exhibits his monumental works in the heart of Arcachon from May 19th to October 4th 2022.
The artist invites you, through his three pictorial totems, to reflect on the current challenges facing us and to contemplate what he likes to call the “Syncretism of Art“: a complete three-dimensional work, at once sculpture, painting and engraving.
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Bâ le Panda
200 x 115 x 135 cm
Bronze and acrylic, engraved, painted and lacquered
Place Thiers
PANDA BA – Symbol of gentleness and strength, the Panda is a species still in danger. By titling his work “Panda Ba” (bā) meaning the number 8, symbol of good luck in China, the artist wants to alert on the condition of this animal and in all derision, asserts that we must now rely on luck to hope for a better future for our planet. The artist wished to expose a couple of pandas, highlighting the sacred nature of their reproduction. The work “Panda Ba” was first imagined as a special commission for the city of Singapore.
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Doggy John
175 x 115 x 157 cm
Bronze, engraved, painted and lacquered
Place Thiers
DOGGY JOHN – We find on the Thiers, the iconic piece of the artist, sphinx of modern times contemplating the world. In the form of a French bulldog, representing love, protection and loyalty to his master, hides a sharp and uncompromising look at his contemporaries. In 1998, the artist imagined his famous Doggy John, first in oil on canvas before freeing himself from the dimensions of painting to take on the round shapes offered by sculpture. Julien Marinetti will give birth to what he will call the “syncretism of the Art” at the same time painting, engraving and sculpture. “The dog is the catalyst of my syncretism of art, that is to say of its totality. What I do is indeed syncretism because there is painting, sculpture and engraving. There are also varnishes, lacquers: I touch a lot of things that normally have nothing to do with each other. Julien Marinetti likes to think of the copyist monks of the Middle Ages, whose palimpsests also required them to repackage the original medium by scraping away ancient parchments.
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Teddy Bear
200 x 140 x 160 cm
Bronze and acrylic, engraved, painted and lacquered
Place Thiers
TEDDY – BEAR – “Wisdom sends us back to childhood” said Blaise Pascal. Behind the reassuring and regressive figure of the Teddy Bear, Julien Marinetti invites us to remember the child we were, and to this candid wisdom sometimes lost but often found with time. An anecdote tells that the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, nicknamed “Teddy”, refused to kill an old bear wounded during a hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902, judging the act unsportsmanlike and cruel. This story was immortalized and caricatured in the press as “Teddy’s Bear”. A year later, in 1903, two Russian immigrants created the famous teddy bear named “Teddy”. The bear symbolizes the warrior spirit with unshakeable courage and calls for fighting, even in the most difficult situations.
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Julien Marinetti is a painter, sculptor and engraver. Born in 1967 in Paris, he grew up in the Saint-Germain-Des-Prés district, where art and crafts were booming. He creates instinctive, unstructured works close to Picasso. After years devoted to oil and acrylic painting, Julien Marinetti tried his hand at sculpture. His pictorial work then took a new turn. The artist exhibited his first realistic bronze sculpture, the iconic bulldog “Doggy John”. He emancipated himself, sculpture became the privileged support of his own painting: from this fusion, he created what he calls “Art Syncretism”.
