In Bordeaux, two spotlights on the protean work of Michel Herreria

HAS the question, altogether hackneyed, of the first artistic emotion, Michel Herreria uses strategic avoidance, exchanging a frontal answer for a set of images and impressions which outline an answer.

Born in Talence in 1965, to French parents of Spanish origin – a stay-at-home mother and a father working in aeronautics – he did not forge his artistic sensibility in the museums where he never went as a child. Rather, she shaped herself in her mother’s homelands, in Navarre, during regular stays in Viana, a small village, and in Logroño, the capital of Rioja, about ten kilometers away. It is linked to public space, buildings, churches, architecture.

Traces and memory

“I’m talking about architecture but it’s also the relationship to all these materials, to everything that is inscribed, engraved in the walls, which become places of writing, of traces, of memory. It’s also the design of urban spaces, their size, their history, human interactions, light, smells… all of that. » A bundle of perceptions enriched by his passionate reading of comics and Marvel from the 1970s, as well as by his practice of drawing, which found a favorable breeding ground in the school setting, supported by stimulating teachers.

Since the 1980s, Michel Herreria has built a plural and expansive body of work, including paintings, drawings (line drawings, on scratch cards, digital, small or large formats), sets and theatrical scenographies. First with the Théâtre à Coulisses collective, which became the Glob Théâtre, until L’Atelier de Mécanique Générale Contemporaine, subtitled: “Experimentation garage where today’s dramaturgies grind”, and within which it always remains active. His work also includes sculptural devices and animated films.

Herreria’s works always maintain a relationship with “the world around him and the way in which he positions himself in relation to this world”. For example through the recurrence of a character reduced to a simple line rushed into ubiquitous circumstances, with “Microphomme” a machine for taking and undergoing speech, or even via the minimalism of the “horizon mirror”, a mirror floating on the water which frames the landscape. A complex and stratified world where the trivial, poetry, violence and the dizzying intertwining of realities mingle, which Michel Herreria captures not without subtlety. “Humour,” he says, “is very serious, it allows us to produce both distance and proximity. A small accuracy in relation to what existence is. »

Michel Herreria, currently presented at the Eponyme gallery (where he exhibited for the first time in 2012), will soon be at the BAG gallery as part of a focus devoted to Éditions Le Bleu du ciel and their emblematic project, bringing together poets contemporaries and visual artists through posters in public spaces.