Le grand digérant (Digesting the great)  No. 4, 102 x 162 x 15

“Giai-Miniet is what’d you get if Kafka had designed Barbie dreamhouses.” (via)

Dreamhouses?  Perhaps more like maisons de cauchemars.   Marc Giai-Miniet‘s painstakingly detailed, mixed-media shadow-box installations are  reminiscent of  a vaguely ominous, fading nightmare; a slumbering visitation to a childhood home,  dilapidated and abandoned,  darkened corridors permeated with a surreal atmosphere of dusty déjà-vu.

Ominous,  fantastical, and yet on some level that barely registers  – these ‘boxes’ are familiar and comforting in a way unique to those corners in which we have previously peeked and will explore once more when we are slumbering and our subconscious holds sway.  Again and again we will wind through our own personal, chaotic and connected dreamhouses –  and M. Giai-Miniet appears to know  this full well.

Born in 1946 in Trappes, France, Marc Giai-Miniet studied at the l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, a distinguished national school of Fine Arts in Paris, France. He is currently the Secretary of the Salon de Mai, a gallery founded in Paris with the purpose of encouraging and exhibiting younger abstract artists.

Marc Giai-Miniet, photo by Sylvie Giai-Miniet

According to Giai-Miniet (though run through Google translator) :

“The ‘boxes’ have appeared relatively late in my work as a painter, as a natural and necessary, and have become an inseparable part, a double play. Reminiscent of my teenage desire to do theater, and perhaps even the deepest yet my memories of childhood games pitched battles between miniature electric trains and installed under the table in the family dining room.  These “boxes”, from their manufacture in the years 92 – 93, repeated the themes of my paintings: the brainwashing scene, visit the mummies, stirring transfusions and various larvae.  Small characters were cardboard cut out of the ballet and existential irony of my painting.  Over work, buildings are becoming increasingly large, the characters have disappeared and books, whole libraries have taken place in conjunction with laboratories, storage rooms, waiting or interrogation cells, stairs, corridors, furnaces, sewers or outbound docks … I understand that the books burned, and figured, were painful metaphor of human life, both mind and matter and inexorably doomed to their fate. . For not only the books can be burned but sometimes transmitted through knowledge, they we “burn”, we transform, we accompany or lead us astray … in a vision became ‘existential.’ ”

Grande Boîte Blanche, 130 x 130 x 11

Boîte Dite au Grand Tamis, 125 x 122 x 18

Zone de Transit

Zone de Transit (for scale) 125 x 150 x 18

Posted by Guest Blogger: S. Elizabeth on June 8th, 2011
Filed under Architecture, Art, Design, Vive la France