Born 1982 in Bastia, France.
Lives and works in Nice, France.
David Raffini’s practice revolves around painting, sculpture, installations, sculptures and video produced mainly in collaboration with Florian Pugnaire, with whom he has won many awards and accolades. Be it on boards, aluminium or canvas, Raffini’s paintings are initially left on the floor of his studio for an extended period, where they are walked over, and gather remnants of paint, dust and other detritus before they enter the next stages of artistic transformation. In his own words: … when I start working on…paintings, my first pretext is…the fact of salvaging all this waste and perpetuating these various alterations of matter… Mainly abstract, the paintings sometimes hint at figuration; the artist is interested in the border through which forms are born. Raffini’s paintings form several on-going series with titles implying action, process and gestures such as Empreinter, Recomposer, Reconstituer, Éprouver. Amongst the series presented in The Poetry of Detritus will be Land Escape, exhibited at Maison Rouge in 2014, on which vividly colourful stains are organised in a way that suggests a representation of waste in a landscape. Also included in the exhibition will be the series Éprouver: stainless-steel plates that have been subjected to a violent process of crashing, gritting, punching and sanding before being covered with graphite and paint. Raffini’s paintings have a humanity that is not always apparent at first sight: they are ‘ghosts’ of an accumulated history of paint, artists’ gestures and art-historical references. Together with Wolska’s sculptures, they create a poetic universe of beauty, hope, memory and renewed life.
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