Ugo Gattoni’s drawings are as generous as the meals he serves up. Rich in detail and playing on texture, carefully composed and combining multiple influences, they take us on journeys and are always packed with mates. Actually, that is the keystone of his creative process: friends and mates, or how to structure an artistic production around a human relationship.
That is how he left for London in 2012 to create Bicycle, a major fresco and writing project which brought him a certain standing and allowed him to choose which traditional French luxury firms to work with. Those special establishments, including Hermès, Ruinart, Cartier, Pierre Frey and Diptyque, trusted him to sublimate their worlds. That required an. incomparable ‘handmade’ art that critically prioritizes time in the creative process. That notion is essential to Ugo’s pieces: their reflexive or plastic conception sometimes takes months or even years.
His imagination has its roots in the pure tradition of the history of statuary art and the fresco. The academic knowledge of drawing he acquired while studying at visual communication school sharpened his technique and has enabled him to bring to life imaginary microcosms of intermingled architecture whose realism flirts with the art of trompe l’oeil painting, as well as ingredients taken from real mythologies and those he invents himself.
His worlds are bursting with details and often spill over the frame despite the impressive size of his creations. His first fresco, Ultra Copains (Ultra Mates), produced in 2011, is 10 meters long. It pitches its scenes in Ugo’s style: a graphic hubbub, an array of heterogeneous, teeming constituent parts combining components taken from Greek and Shamanic mythology, together with urban landscapes, travel, the world of partying and even anatomy. A domain where he makes idols of his friends, drawing the faces of those close to him and positioning them at the heart of his fantastic settings.
The size of format and density of detail creates a play of scale that embraces viewers and encourages them to come wander through the rich graphic scenery, as if time were suspended, as if this stroll in Ugo’s world were part of an enchanted parenthesis. All these illustrations have an echo thanks to the play of details rebounding from one drawing to the next, making each one a tiny fragment extracted from his realm.
Like a ‘fictional archeologist’, he is inspired by and reinterprets references from ancient civilizations to build his own worlds, bearing witness to a time that is already almost in our past. Like an architect, he intelligently and meticulously constructs each detail of the worlds he graphically creates, thinking about the movements and behavior of the characters who live inside them. So he fleshes out his drawings, already rich in their architectural, sculptural, historical dimension and their philosophical, anthropological, sociological and even botanical scope, in order to ensure his settings are absolutely 360° immersive.
It was in 2015, with the piece Hippopolis done for Hermès and its famous silk square, that his thirst for precision encouraged him to refine his pictorial realm by enhancing its immersive qualities with animation, sound and, for the first time, color. Then in 2018, he dreamt up the Nebula project, a surrealistic dream world that raises to a peak all the aspects he loves to bring into play: cuisine, mates, travel, music and a mythological tale structured around the idea of infinite happiness as the driving force of a marvelous world. He sees Nebula as a (very) long-term project in multiple forms, planned for the time being through the prism of the short film, so completing the plunge into his imagination.
To develop it, Ugo asked his friend-artists (or maybe the opposite) to come and join him in Mexico – his home for two years – for an artistic experience. During a month-long residency, a group of around twenty musicians, plastic artists, designers, actors, architects, 3D modelers and choreographers took their immersive adventure to its limit and reproduced – in the form of a road trip – a convoy that crosses the land of Nebula each day. Together, they visited places that echoed with the fantastic fable and studied and interpreted each aspect of life in that ecosphere.
Returning from Mexico in 2019, Ugo had a new project: Le Comalito. Again combining his passion for sharing, exploration, the fusion of genres and excuses for conviviality, he created a cuisine influenced by French and Mexican gastronomy, which fired his imagination during his two years across the Atlantic. Taking the form of residencies in restaurants and events all over the world, Le Comalito is above all an alibi for total Epicureanism, because “you see, Le Comalito is a party too.”
Margaux Bez