Visual Artist
Biography
From his childhood in Africa, David Farsi retained a taste for vivid, warm colours and for simple, essential forms. As a teenager he entered the École Boulle to train in applied arts and fine craftsmanship, studying cabinetmaking and interior architecture — an artisanal grounding that remains central to his approach.
Self-taught in painting, he spent many years experimenting before fully embracing the medium. Over fifty years of practice he has explored pictorial materiality, from palette-knife work to smooth lacquer, constantly seeking intensity in texture and colour; lacquer became the meeting point between craftsmanship and expressive intent.
In 1997 he turned to digital drawing, creating 1,024 luminous images presented at random within a screen-based tableau titled Ko — their existence dependent on time and the viewer's gaze. The printed editions later rekindled his desire to paint.
Influenced by Dalí, he developed a fictional universe inhabited by a mythical bestiary. Furniture, inherited from his training, structures the pictorial space as a metaphor for place. Often conceived as polyptychs, his works invite the viewer into a temporal journey balanced between narrative, form, and material.
Statement
Questioning an artistic practice dominated by intellectual discourse, David Farsi chooses to paint without theorising — to rediscover the pleasure of the eye and to evoke dreams without explanation.
Playing with form, space, material, and colour, he seeks the marvellous and cultivates a playful spirit close to childhood, while keeping the mastery acquired through experience. At odds with elitism, he wishes to make his works accessible to everyone: a timeless universe, close to dreams, that invites each person to become a creator again.
Selected Works
