Born in 1945, lives and works in Menton.Serge Maccaferri is a ‘historic’ member of the Ecole de Nice. He was a member of the INterVENTION group (with Alocco, Charvolen, Dolla, Miguel, Saytour, Viallat, Quin and Monticelli) from 1968, then co-creator in 1969 of the Groupe 70 (with Charvolen, Miguel, Isnard and Chacallis).Since 1970, the year of his first exhibitions at the Galerie Alexandre de la Salle in Vence, he has been shown in galleries and museums in Paris, Toulouse, La Rochelle, Limoges, Marseille, Bourges, Antibes, Menton, Vallauris, Berlin, Milan, Bologna and Tokyo.Serge Maccaferri began painting, literally, by the tape. This form has recurred in his work to this day (the wooden strips). In 1969, he ended them with arrows, encouraging the eye to cross the boundaries.
Since then, Serge Maccaferri has either pushed or pulled – no doubt both at the same time – the coherence of his work from this leap from the supposedly flat surface where work of illusory depth is produced, into the concrete depth of the materials and physical spaces it requires. Yes, it’s all about masses, volumes, expanses, liquidity, solidities, gains and losses (I’m referring to the works in which he burns part of a tree trunk or branch, collects the ashes, mixes them with linseed oil and siccative and deposits them on paper covered with a fine mesh (mosquito netting) or a loose canvas. The result is a series of procedures that involve cutting, folding, twisting, agglomerating, sanding, scraping, burning, assembling, building up layers, pouring pastes and so on. It brings to mind the upheaval that volcanoes produce with the materials at their disposal.This is because Serge Maccaferri has spent his lucrative professional life working with buildings. He was a house painter. From there, he draws most of his models, his ‘everyday landscapes’ (tools and techniques), to transmute and sublimate them in what we call the symbolic spaces of art, where they lose their original nature and function to acquire others. They lose them… but they don’t forget them; their memory, for the discerning eye, is apparent.It should be noted that this work, unlike current practice, is done blindly, because the face that will be shown is out of sight of the actor, and the support that enables this work to be done disappears when it is hung up to view, but not without having left a few clues to its past presence.
