Felice Varini
Born in Switzerland in 1952, Felice Varini lives and works in Paris. The artist’s medium is the architectural space and his subject matter is the creation of vantage points. Felice Varini began developing his geometric works at the very end of the 1970s. They are deployed on an architectural scale and their monumentality acts as a challenge to urbanism and the cityscape. Starting out from preliminary compositions using photographs, Felice Varini projects his vast bi-dimensional drawings onto the relief of the chosen site, exploiting the principles of anamorphosis on a monumental scale. The spectator is offered an optical experience based on the search for a unique vantage point, from which a perfect vision of the drawing is revealed: checkerboards, concentric circles, etc. Positioned elsewhere in the space, the visitor only perceives a confusion of curved lines with a chaotic and fragmented appearance, extremely dynamic in nature.
Felice Varini has produced dozens of architectural scale installations throughout the world on the sites of historic monuments (the Jeanne d’Arc Chapel in Thouars, the Chateau des Adhémar in Montélimar, the Cité de Carcassonne) or in remarkable places such as Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille, the Grande Halle de la Villette and the Place de l’Odéon in Paris and the docks in Saint-Nazaire, etc. His works feature in countless museums and collections: the Pompidou Center in Paris, the MAC / VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (FR), the Chateau d’Oiron (FR), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Sion (CH), Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Nagano (JP) the MAMCO, Geneva (CH), the UBS Collection, Basel (CH), the Société Générale Collection, Paris, the Allianz Collection, Berlin, the Clariant Collection, Frankfurt (DE), the Swiss Re Collection, Armonk (US), the City of New Haven Collection (US).