Artist
Contribution
Notice
HENRI FORNASARI
1954 in Créhange, Moselle – 2012 in Chigy, Yonne.
He studied Fine Arts at the University of Aix-en-Provence and took part in the conception and realization of stage sets for Jean-Claude Nieto in Marseille and Paris in 1976 and 1977. It was in Aix-en-Provence that he met Liliane Giraudon and Jean-Jacques Viton.
His early work is characterized by an intense practice of large-format drawing. At his solo exhibition at Galerie Ornis in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1984, his drawings proposed a renewed reading of space and of its perception.
“He combines in a single drawing the rigorous and dry line of industrial drawing (if dryness there is!) with a suggestive and sensitive representation of fragments of architecture affected by wear. (…) By superimposing these two drawings, it is indeed the notion of time that is introduced here (…)”
(Haagsche Courant).
From 1990 onward, the conception and fabrication of varied supports directly contributed to the staging of visual effects.
Galerie Tenri in Paris in 1996, the Maison du Don Lecourbe in Paris, and the Maison du XVe in Bar-sur-Seine also presented his work in solo exhibitions.
“Henri Fornasari is a contemporary illusionist who plays with the codes of perspective and with our habits of looking… A modern and austere figure of the baroque artist who populated cathedral domes with artifices, this rigorous and methodical artist conceives inverted trompe-l’œil (…)”
(Bertrand Kelle).
His participation in the 5th International Sculpture Competition in Voiron, in the installations in the park of Tancognaguet in Fursac, and at the Templar Chapel of Avalleur, Aube, in 2000, takes into account another aspect of his work, in which a dialogue is established between object, sculpture, and space.
His works have been presented in group exhibitions, among others: Les Jardins de l’Utopie at La Chartreuse, Villeneuve-lez-Avignon; Mostra del Larzac; Lieux d’Artistes and Galerie Cinabre in Marseille; Biennale de la Jeune Peinture Méditerranéenne at Galerie des Ponchettes in Nice; Art–Literature–Psychoanalysis at La Vieille Charité in Marseille, for which he created the poster; Novembre à Vitry in Vitry-sur-Seine (1988, 1989, 1991); Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui in Paris; Biennale of Graphic Arts in Saint-Maur; Jeune Peinture à Paris and the Salon de Montrouge, 1995.
He described his research in the following manner:
Identifying architectural sites or timeless locations…
Framing the gaze while revealing the unsayable…
Confronting the retinal image with multiple systems of spatial projection…
Introducing doubt into the thought of space…
Working through transparency in the landscape, where drawing and volume are articulated in a paradoxical equivalence.
Source: Hélène Mooren on December 19, 2025
BS22 – January/May 1988
pp.165-170
HENRI FORNASARI
6 A4 sheets – 21 x 29.7 cm. Collages, photocopies and drawings.