PROFILES

An artist whose protean oeuvre takes us inside the human soul as in surrealist dreams, Erick Ifergan has work on show in Cannes, Vallauris and Antibes this summer.

At the artist's home-cum-studio in Grasse, organic black lines snake across old walls and doors and up flights of stairs to climax in a myriad of pieces of ceramic. Inside this house with its old cement- slab floor, a piano sits in state in a corner, a sculpt­ed snake metamorphoses into a trumpet... While dreaming of one day having his own artist's house like the Fernand Léger Museum in Biot, Erick Ifergan has made this place in his own image: eclectic, unclassifiable, opening a window in reality onto other worlds. Perhaps it's that deliberate liberty that this prolific creative has retained from the score of years he lived in Los Angeles. The power of his inspiration doesn't restrict itself to a single art form, expressing itself in turn through photography, film, drawing, painting, sculpture, and music too.

In Magritte's footsteps
Erick Ifergan's background is not ordinary. Born in Morocco in 1958, he began his career as a photo­grapher and that led him to moving pictures. His surrealist, emotion-imbued style landed him commissions for music videos – Alain Souchon's Quand J’serai K.O., Jean-Jacques Goldman, Julien Clerc, Patricia Kaas, international stars including Rod Stewart – and, through his Serial Dreamer production company, advertising campaigns for Apple, IBM, Dior and Audi. Then one day he
decided to employ his creativity to develop his own ideas. He explains: "Emir Kusturica is a musi­cian too, David Lynch paints, Julian Schnabel decorated the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. They feel this need to express themselves in different media, it's common on the international under­ground scene. A filmmaker necessarily works with many artists."

Those the American dream forgot
This summer Johnny 316, his film shot on Holly­wood Boulevard, is being shown at Espace Miramar. On the star-trodden sidewalk where churches rub shoulders with sex shops, Ifergan filmed his favourite actor, Vincent Gallo, as an endlessly
sermoning street preacher whose meeting with a young unemployed woman triggers a tragic love story. Fascinated by the unseen mindscape of every individual, Ifergan has likewise captured night-time Los Angeles in a series of portraits christened Hope. The made-up clown on the street, the woman asleep at a bus stop... were not snapped without thought; in neon light that exacerbates the greens and reds, he speaks to us of veiled stories within stories. As an ensemble these portraits have inspired a screenplay that Ifergan is presently working on: "They're not at the best time in their life but they're still in an optimistic transition. Hope is born of the most austere things."

Alice opens the door
Erick Ifergan sees Jean Cocteau as his spiritual father but also cites Walt Disney's cartoons among his key influences: "He understood that to create the marvellous you first have to pass through a phase of uncertainty, otherwise it's just like an ad in which everyone smiles. The Snow White meta­phor: after a night amidst terrifying trees, she awakes to birds singing. You could make 30 music videos out of Alice in Wonderland!" The artist is creating and displaying his latest work in the Sassi Milici gallery in Vallauris, where Picasso and Braque fired their pottery. In Ifergan's figurative-tending-
to-abstract world we meet a puppet king in the form of a crowned pot with handles, a red enamel rhinoceros with a strange horn... He has painted a set of plates for master chef Joël Robuchon's Grande Maison in Bordeaux; he sculpts decorative lamps; in a "book of spells" titled The World's Biggest Book, he writes poems around painted photos. Erick Ifergan's art is a form of automatic writing guided by an unceasing flow of inspiration: "For me, a perfect artwork is a series of imperfections that I prevent myself erasing. Each error leads me to a new discovery, as with the path of life."

By Tanja Stojanov