ÉRIC MICHEL

Eric Michel, the French multimedia artist, was born on June 20, 1962 in Aix-en-Provence. His first creative interests led him to undertake visual arts studies, and then he studied music with the Martenot method. His musical inclination first led him to classical music, then to rock and to underground music. He came back to painting and sculpture during the eighties. 
After finishing high-level scientific studies, Eric Michel at first went towards the financial field even as he pursued his artistic activities. The fact of running an American bank in Tokyo, did not prevent him from having two parallel activities and of having many solo and group exhibitions. His first one-man show was in Tokyo in the Design Festa Gallery in November 2001. His stay in Japan also led to his being invited to take part in the contemporary art Biennale ” Senza Frontiere ” in Kawasaki in December 2003. 
On his return to France in 2002, Eric Michel began to intensify his artistic activity by exhibiting in various galleries, Salons, and prestigious multimedia installations . He was invited to show his works in the Salon de Montrouge in 2004 and 2005, where the artist discovered the microcosm of the Parisian art world. In 2006, he took part in the edition of the Nuit Blanche in Paris with his multimedia installation ” Nuit Fluo “. He then exhibited in London, New York, and Miami, where his works were noticed and favorably received. 
At the present time his life is shared between Rome, Italy and Paris where he devotes himself completely to his artistic activity. The artist paints works, canvases saturated with colours, with pure pigments, rhythmical and flooded with light. His videos and fluorescent light works are essentially based on the tradition of seeking the immaterial, in the steps of Yves Klein, James Turrell and Dan Flavin. 
Eric Michel allows himself total freedom, be it luminous conceptual installations, reworked urban signalisation, manipulated photographs, video compilations, paintings and collages that the artist uses as vehicles for his esthetic approach and in which light plays an essential role that he defines thus: ” I love the light. It is the privileged vehicle for my sensitivity, for my work. Light has something unique: it is simultaneously corpuscular and undulatory, material and immaterial. As far as I am concerned, the artist needs to be a ferryman, to be precise between the material to the immaterial, from the real to the imaginary, towards a pure sensitivity. ” 
During the past seven years, Eric Michel has shown his works and his installations in over fifty solo and group exhibitions in Japan, Italy, France, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Many catalogues, publications and articles have been devoted to his art works, which are found in many collections throughout Asia, Europe and the USA. 
Eric Michel lives and works between Paris, France and Rome, Italy.

ANTE GLIBOTA,  Paris, August 30, 2007.

(Ante Glibota – Historian of Art and Architecture – is a Titular Member of the European Academy of Science, Art and Humanities. He was co-curating the show “Sport in Art” and this text was part of the catalogue of the Exhibition)