Ionas H

Ionas is a French painter, who died of pleural cancer, at the age of 52, on November 27th 2009. He was born in Samarkand on November 1st 1957 and he grew up in Dunkerque, in the North of France. He then settled in a small town in the south of France to paint, write and teach art to children.
This is how he was speaking about his work:

A researcher of art in my little studio corner, I move forward by surprising myself. I go about planting small periscopes into the belly of Reality, which by nature is unreachable. And I look.

1. Given reality as chaos, through pictorial abstraction it would be a matter of rendering and recording the seismic, the telluric, the force fields, the flesh, the rhythm, the convulsions, the viscera, the flows, the fluids, the jubilation.
I call these fragments of living reality “fragmes.”
This aspect of my work, called abstract, is in fact the most concrete of all. At stake is the materialization of movement, the resistance of the surface, the multiple devices of pictorial tension, even what painting itself does to us. What is painted is concrete (“I am matter,” exclaims Flaubert’s Saint Anthony in the end).
What becomes abstract is what is activated by the gaze—eye and brain—a kind of mental geography, f...

Ionas studied art at the University of Lille in the north of France.

Personal Exhibitions

1986 Gallery Saint Ravy-Demangel
Montpellier (France)

1987 Gallery Valmay, rue de Seine
Paris (France)

1988 Cultural Center Les Archers
Cambrai (France)

1991 The Gallery, Mayfair
London (England)

1992 Gallery Jacques Coeur
Montpellier (France)

1993 Gallery Hélène Trintignan
Montpellier (France)

1994 Chapelle de la Salamandre
Nîmes (France)

1996 Chapelle des pénitents
Clermont l’Hérault (France)

1998 Gallery Ginac
Nîmes (France)

1999 Gallery Midi
Rotterdam (Holland)
Gallery Victor Hugo
Aigues-Mortes (France)

2000 La Louve
Exhibition in personal studio

2001 Gallery Dana Weigel
Berlin (Germany)

2001 Gallery Christophe Liron
Millau (France)

2003 Center of Contemporary Art: Les Pénitents
Aniane (France)

2007 Musée Fleury
Lodève (France)

2009 Château des Evêques
Lavérune (France)

2010 Chapelle St Pierre
Montbazin (France)

2011 Hotel Magnol
Montpellier (France)


Group Exhibitions

1986 “Figurations from sixties to now”
Museum of Carcassonne (France)

1987 French Selection, Biennale of Barcelona
Barcelona (Spain)

1988 Rencontres Méditerranéennes
Montpellier (France)

1989 French Selection, La Stanza Verde
Cagliari (Sardi...