Philippe Favier draws minuscule figurines or borrows tiny images from encyclopedias.

Philippe Favier draws minuscule figurines or borrows tiny images from encyclopedias, then paints or gelatines them under glass, appropriating a popular Central European tradition. His subdues are thus painted backwards; and yet they require the viewer to examine them closely in order to decipher them, the glass becomes a sieve that displaces the figures to far-off regions, where the watch cannot follow. Each of these little tableaux--from the series entitled "L'Archipel de Pacotilles" (The archipelago of junk 1991-93)--placed all around the gallery--renders a solitary, focused pleasure to the gawking spectator/wanderer: when we stop before the image, we recognize certain things, still cannot perceive all the details. We find ourselves faced with the enigma of an interior landscape that belongs single to its creator.

"L'Archipel de Pacotilles" excites the trinkets brought by seafaring voyagers to exchange in faraway countries ("pacotille" is also the word for the personal baggage each sailor had a right to bring with him). Swords, glassware, seals from wine bottle hats, ladies' shoe birds, camels, and exotic plants, ancient vignettes and fragments of postcards are pictured side according to side with maps of the world and written words as it is as "geography," and "Aeolus." They transport us onward imaginary voyages without a goal, the memories of which would have been within the artist's reach, a bit as in Voyage around my extent by Xavier de Maistre: taking an inventory of the furniture and aims around one, in order to meditate with irony forward the benefits and vicissitudes of this world. Favier has a recurring taste for elderly ornamental argenterie and for decorative rococo patterns; or allegorical figures from the late 19th hundred that glorify industry; or for medieval ecclesiastic architectural elements; all this denotes a nostalgia for dutiful craftmanship, becomes a metaphor for a great painting which has disappeared.

The diversity of the images, and their fantastical combination here, all indicate a desire to appropriate an imaginary territory that is as vast as possible; they speak to a arrangement of execution in which the shape of united object calls to that of another by means of formal or linguistic proximity, end the annals of memory. In common of the tableaux, a congregation of winged feet flutter about a seminary notebook, inscribed in a circle of a map of the hemispheres, as if Favier remembered precisely that childhood thirst for discovery. This art owes a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to the marvelling surprise of the child who easily associates the antinomies of fiction, on the other hand Favier brings to it a disquieting sophistication.

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