Biography
Aymar was born in Bordeaux in 1973, although his family is originally from Reunion Island (Indian Ocean) on his father’s side, and Normandy on his mothers’. He grew up between Normandy and Provence, in France, and moved to the USA at the age of 23, where he has stayed for over 12 years living in New York, Miami and San Francisco.
Aymar has been painting for twenty years or so, but his interest started long before that. He followed his calling to study Plastic Arts in Aix en Provence, then Art History in Montpellier, where he discovered some of his favorites. Once in the US, Aymar perfected his technique by working as a scenic artist and set designer for a number of years, and he also had an incursion of six years into the world of business and new technologies, while part timing as a commissioned artist for interior designers. It is in mid 2009 that he decided to focus completely on his own creations and become a full time artist.
Aymar’s latest series is developed around trees. The trees symbolize nature - simple and yet very complex – and the passing of time. Aymar’s trees don’t usually have branches, because his intention is to not represent a specific type of tree, so that everyone can identify with the scenery and make it their own. There are usually no characters or a specific scene in the paintings, and that is not because the artist has not imagined a scene. He has actually imagined many, but he wants the spectator to imagine their own. For the artist, the streets and landscapes are not empty; it is just like when using very long exposure when taking a photograph: after many scenes have gone by only the fixed elements stay in the final picture while the moving ones blur and disappear.
Many paintings represent trees and walls. In addition to being an important element in the composition giving depth to the painting and reflecting light, the wall itself holds a special meaning for Aymar. Growing up in Normandy, scarred by the Second World War, he witnessed how walls told the stories of battles through their engravings of bullets, and since then he thinks they have memory, keeping record of the events that happen around them.
