“Wandering the Borderlands,” the latest exhibition at the East Hawaii Cultural Center, draws on the eclectic life and childhood experiences of artist Pier Fichefeux.
His father was a comparative theologian and historian specializing in the early Middle Ages who delighted in telling his offspring stories.
Fichefeux recalls his father asking children to supply him with any random word, which he would use as a theme for tales that lasted for days. His childhood was populated with supernatural images from the walls of dim churches built atop earlier churches. His imagination was seeded with pre-flood, demonic crawling and flying creatures — characters and caricatures which came to inhabit and animate his paintings.
In a flea market in Paris, when he was just out of high school, the young artist sold his first sculpture, a metal automaton cobbled together from parts scavenged in scrap yards. He shared his notebook drawings of grand automata that he planned to build with the unknown buyer, who fortuitously turned out to be the artist, musician and film maker David Lynch, who Fichefeux admired.
Fichefeux used the money from selling the sculpture to fly to Japan, returning to France a few months later broke and homeless. One of his clients from the Paris flea market hired him to sit his gallery, where Fichefeux learned Photoshop and began creating illustrations and graphics for advertising. He received a scholarship to Fabrica, a research center in Italy, and his career in digital advertising began.
Two years later, Fichefeux moved to Amsterdam, where, inspired by a chance encounter with an artist in a park, he traded his digital pad for a notebook and pencil, and began to draw and paint in earnest. A few years later he moved to New York and signed with a noted gallery.
Fichefeux painted in New York for six years. Traveling to visit remote regions of the world, he developed a personal relationship with Mauna Loa, subsequently moving to the Big Island with his wife and family and establishing a studio on its slopes.
“Hawaii is the farthest place I can go from my home in Franc,” Fichefeux said in a press release. “Being in Hawaii is not an accident. Since I was a kid I’ve been inspired by volcanoes. I’ve traveled to many volcanoes around the world. Pierre means stone. Fichefeux means fire-starter.”
“Wandering the Borderlands” is on view this Saturday until Sept. 27, with an opening reception at 6 p.m. tonight (Aug. 1).
For more information, visit EHCC online at ehcc.org, call 961-5711, or visit EHCC at 141 Kalakaua St. Current gallery and office hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and the gallery is open Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.