Armand Campi

Armand Campi was born in France in 1942 and raised in Cuba. He returned to Europe to live in Spain and France. At the age of 16 Campi ventured out on his own to Paris. It was the late 1950s, the decade of existentialism, a school of thought that would strongly influence his art and thinking throughout his life.

 

 

 

During his stay in Paris, Campi took drawing lessons at the art school 'La Grande

Chaumière' in Montparnasse. It was the only art course he ever took. Apart from La Grande Chaumière he is entirely self-taught. Already at age seventeen, Campi participated in a group exhibition at the Galerie Lambert in Paris. This was to be the first of many exhibitions in Europe.

 

Armand Campi has been painting for almost half a century. Over the years he has

expressed a vast range of styles, from surrealism in his early days, to abstract

expressionism in the 1980s, to his current style that sums up faint reminiscences of

the old masters such as Goya, Moreau and Turner. However he is a contemporary

artist.

 

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Series and sequences

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“I feel I have finally succeeded in dissociating my work from my personal hang-ups.

It’s the problems of painting that fascinate me. It’s them I’m trying to work out in the

canvas. Most vital is the question how to transpose the original image. The original

image is imaginary, has no physique, recognises no bounds. The canvass however

demands the concrete, the physical and takes it’s claim. This implies that the

conversions, by it’s very nature defective, while at the same time it continues to

challenge, to incite experiment, study, and striving after the optimum. It’s dealing with

a complex interaction of image, technique, size, composition, materials, colours etc.

These mutually corroborate and restrict. They may harmonise, or react into chaos and

nonsense. No one can know if there’s one tuning into the optimum. This insight led

me through my experiments and leads me to painting in series and sequences.”

 

Armand Campi