Thomas Lanfranchi
I was born in Marseille south of France in 1964, from a family of fishermen and sailors.
For some reasons, I can’t really explain ever since I was a child, I have been drawn by the vastness and evanescence of the sky through stories I heard on the radio, saw on TV or read about these « luminous phenomenons » either religious or extra-terrestrial, school of thought that our current modernity has inscribed to the paranormal.
In 1985 after studing sciences, I enroled Marseille School of Art. In 1991 I did a postgraduate course in Joseph Kosuth’s studio in Düsseldorf kunst Akademie/Germany.
I soon felt to get the universe of the matter of forms with a more personal way, motivated by phenomenons beyond representation. In that period, one of my first performance was intitled, « cube of sky ». My aim was to remodel a cloud by concentration of my mind and to act on the masses of gasses that contitues a clound, and to make it into a cube.
In 1992, in order to latch with something more real, I began drawing on the envelopes of post I received. They were mini events of my dayly life. Very soon images of science fiction’s phenomenons, unusual and paranormal fantasms began to invad my drawings.
At the same time, I began making out cubes of paper, cardboards, scotch and plastic. My objectives was to put them outside as meditation’s space. They were ligth and open air. It was from these artefact made up, scotch, plastic and nylon that the flying shapes were born, inhabited with ideas of transparency, ligthness and levitation of a volume in space which were and has been since the start, the base of my researches.
The only traces of my outdoors performances are photos and films, taken closest to the action.
Since 1993 to today, I did some exhibitions, residences in France.
Between 1996 and 2001, I drove cross country in south west of America and Australia, showing my works in Pasadena Norton Simeon Museum and have been invited at Sydney, Liverpool (U.K) and Gent (Belgium) biennales of art.
In 2008, I did my first solo exhibition in Semiose gallery, Paris.
In 2012, the piece of writing « A wasp in the K.way, close encunters of the 2nd and 3rd type in Gascony », was published with Semiose édition, Paris.
Email:
lanfranchi.thomas64@gmail.com