March 8, 2004 HONG KONG—Painter and performance artist Jean-Pierre Potier plans to take Hong Kong by storm by not only showing his multi-layered cityscapes at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery but also by painting the town red. He does live performance paintings in public arenas. (Specifics of performances will be given at a later date).
Jean-Pierre Potier is a traveling painter with a contemporary interest in city landscapes. In this latest group of works showing at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery he relates these two elements in portraying Hong Kong.
After working on a series of works in New York from 1997-2002, Potier made a major move in his work towards Asia with “Images de Corée” (2002-2003) where he reveals his impressions of S. Korea especially the city of Busan. His concentration has now fallen on Hong Kong.
It is the effervescence and dynamism of cities that Potier is a genius at portraying. His paintings are at once a poem and at the same time a busy intersection of city life. They are multilayers of chaos and fragmentation but are held together by the buzz and soul of the city itself.
His work is unique in the way it is made, both technically and by the choice of materials he uses. With the aid of solvents he transfers fragments of photographic elements onto a composite of ‘drop paper,’ a mix of paper and fiberglass. He then uses acrylics, watercolors, black stone and inks equally to conceive the final painting where the different elements are linked by a sort of fog. Man occupies a central place in the composition being both actor and author in his urban universe.
Jean-Pierre Potier exhibits in Paris, New York, South Korea, and Hong Kong. His works have been collected by the Georges Pompidou Museum in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Franklin Furnace Collection, as well as the Unesco Centre of Catalonia in Barcelona.