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Herve Flament
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Biography
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Grand son of the clown John Scott who travelled throughout Europe with the Australian Circus in the early part of the 20th century, Herve Scott Flament was born in Paris on February 1st 1959. His father was an acrobat who commited suicide when Herve was very young. His mother raised him alone and inculcated him with her tastes for the supernatural, fantasy and the ?fantastique? culture born a century before inherited from the Romantism era.
He began studies in the natural sciences intending to become either a paleontologist or a zoologist, but he changed paths in 1977 when the punk movement unfurled in the western world. He had started playing guitar a few months before and dedicated the next ten years of his life to music. He played with several french punk bands and set up the group Ici Paris and recorded one LP and four singles. New interests carried him into uncharted directions and he began to paint. He immediately sold his first paintings which incited him to devote more of his time towards his new endeavour. Herve taught himself to paint and brought back an ancient painting technique that no present art school could have taught him.
In 1987 he played guitar with one of the most well known french singers Jacques Dutronc, appeared on many TV shows and starred on Dutronc's ?CQFD? album. During this period he became involved in the occult circles, that gave him esoteric knowledge and the nickname Frater Potentius (Strengh, Power). Back on the music scene, in 1989 he recorded two more songs with the now popular french musician PierPolJak for a compilation album with Raggae muffin musician Tonton David. Herve Flament then became interested in Egyptology and began to study ancient egyptian hieroglyphics wich lead him to translate the Book of the Dead in the papyrus of the Ani version, a file of magic texts and spells dedicated to protecting the deceased in their journey into the Nightland.
Unexpectedly doors of galleries started opening for his paintings and since then he regularly exhibits throughout Paris at such galleries as Galerie Nunki during the years of 1987, 88, 92, 93, and 94 as well as Galerie Arts Tournelle in 1989, Galerie Art Club in 1995, and Galerie Drouant in 1996 and currently in the Musee de l'Erotisme as well as 2055 Gallery in Houston, Texas.
In November 1997 he was honoured by being asked to exhibit his work at the Grand Opening of the Musee Erotisme Paris (Erotic Museum Paris). In January 1998 he was invited to exhibit at the Grand Arche de la Defense to participate in the retrospective show of 15 years of research into an art field where official art would never dare to venture.
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Statement
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Official art has always relegated ? fantastique ? to a minor genre and allowed it to be extant only in cartoons and commercial movie pictures, in fact so hidden the literary gothic and post-romantic masterpieces which were its craddle.
So what is ? fantastique ? anyway? First a feeling as ancient as humanity itself, a combination of fear and wonder face to face with the Unknown. It was born at the dawn of civilization in meticulous religious and magic rituals, antic theatrical performances where each actor played the part of the god to capture his mighty strenght and directed it to his own blessing and to that of his community. Divination, this intuition fed from the imagination and its first incarnations came in the shape of tales and legendary sagas. From primitive oral tradition and popular folklore, the fantastique soon bloomed into poetry, then later became a reference point for a new art form: the Gothic style writing. From Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Gregory Lewis succeeded Mary Shelley, Erckmann-Chatrian, Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire and the decadent european school.
If the 19th century gave birth to the ? fantastique ?, the 20th century propelled the genre into an unending arborescence, from pure terror and heroic fantasy, closer to poetry, to the political and social philosophy we today call science-fiction.
Literature allowed the Fantastique genre to assert itself but Fine Art seems to have barred it except for symbolism and english Pre-Raphaelite painters, then surrealism drew it to a close, intellectualising it and submissing it to the laws of Sigmund Freud.
However, Fantastique Art, this sacred perversion of the old Romantism is the major art of the 20th and of the 21th century to come because it kept an anchor deep within feelings and sensations which has always been the driving force of talent.
As our planet is shrinking day by day, as artists are sinking into their dogmas and into this propaganda that became the history of Art, new frontiers are opening to us: the conquest of space and of our own interior world. The time has come for explorers and adventurers of Thought, a Kingdom for freemen!
I have opened a gate to the other world,a more sensitive realm in correlation to what the ancient Egyptians termed ? intelligence of the heart ?. In each painting I explore further into the depths of the mind, following Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton. This universe is not one-dimensional and these paintings attempt to reflect the multi-faceted nature of our cosmos. In it, no good nor evil, or perhaps both at the same time.
Like Omar Khayyam said: ?I'm heaven and hell.?
Je te prendrai la main
Pour t'amener a de nouvelles connaissances
Et nous laisserons par devers nous
Les hommes croire ce qu'ils ont toujours cru.
Frater Potentius
I will take your hand
To lead you to new knowledges
And we will leave behind us
Men believe what they always did.
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Exhibitions
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1987 ,88,92,93,94,95 Galerie Nunki Paris 17eme
1989 Galerie Arts Tournelles Paris 5eme
1987,88 Galerie Rolland Biarritz
1995 Galerie Art Club Paris 1er
1996 Galerie Drouant Paris 16eme
1988,90 Galerie Garance Saint-Germain-en-Laye
1996,99,2000,01,02,03 musee de l'erotisme Paris XVIIIeme
1996 La Cigale Paris XVIIIeme
1993 Le Cercle Republicain avenue de l'Opera Paris 1er
2000 Galerie Jardins des Arts et association Safir
1997,98 La Grande Arche Paris Neuilly,La Defense
2002 Galerie L'arche de Morphee Paris 20eme
2000 2055Gallery Houston Texas
2003 musee de l'erotisme Paris XVIIIeme
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