Pierre Garcia-Fons

PIERRE GARCÍA-FONS (Spain, 1928- Paris, 2016).
"Easter morning".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 146 x 115 cm.
Pierre Garcia-Fons was a French painter, lithographer and sculptor of Catalan origin. Throughout his life he maintained a firm artistic independence, identifying himself as a "painter of the feeling". The son of Spanish exiles, his father, Pedro García y Martínez, originally from Cartagena, was a militant of the National Confederation of Labor and a combatant in the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. After the Republican defeat and the Retreat, he was briefly interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp before joining a company of foreign workers to avoid forced repatriation to Spain. His mother, Amparo Fons, came from the Valencian region. Pierre, the eldest of four siblings, emigrated with his mother and sisters to France in 1938 because of the war.
Settled in Perpignan, Pierre studied at the boarding school of the Spanish Center and began working at an early age. His approach to art was stimulated by the sculptor Manolo Valiente, a friend of his father, with whom he began clay modeling and wood carving. Later, he trained at the municipal drawing school of Perpignan, under the tutelage of the painter André Fons-Godail.
From 1948, he began to work as an independent sculptor and to paint everyday scenes influenced by misérabilisme, an aesthetic current that reflected the social crudeness of the post-war period. He participated in local exhibitions and in 1949 he presented his first solo show at the Arago hall in Perpignan. His early painting is characterized by a deliberate economy of means, neutral tonalities and a realistic approach that reveals the anguish and introspection of a generation marked by the war.
In 1949 he moved to Paris, where he worked as a frame sculptor in Jaume Vidal's workshop, a meeting place for numerous exiled artists. He attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and joined the circle of Catalan and Spanish painters such as Antoni Clavé, Henri Cueco and Xavier Valls. In 1950 he was admitted to the first Salon de la Jeune Peinture, a key space for post-war painting, and in which he held various positions until 1967, when he retired from its committee.
Thanks to a travel grant awarded by the State in 1956, he worked in Corrèze with Henri Cueco and upon his return presented a series of works that marked a transition towards a more synthetic and structured language, with a more lively palette. His work was then oriented towards the representation of working-class urban life, dealing with living conditions in social housing.