BIOGRAPHY

MARK MAGGIORI 

Mark Maggiori was born on June 16th 1977 in the town of Fontainebleau, about an hour south of Paris, in the middle of the forest.
He is an artist with many skills. He is a photographer, painter, writer, and also a film-maker with his own recognizable and unique style. He makes you plunge in his universe wich is both dream-like and realistic.
Also a musician, he was the lead singer of the rock-metal band « Pleymo » (1998-2007), with which he recorded 5 albums on the music label Epic. From that musical experience, he’ll manage to shift the energy he had on stage into a lively creativity.
Mark has bred his own style throughout the years, using his time and his environment an its colors to perfect his art.

In 1996, he decides to enter an art school, without much of a knowledge about the artistic world. Through a hard-working discipline, he manages to come up to his teachers’ expectations . It is by passion that he’s going to throw his whole body and soul in the learning of the History of art. He makes his hand on making copies of famous paintings, as part of the formation he follows.

After graduating in 2000, he begins to work on numerous music videos, and on an anime TV show called « the children of Okura ». It is after the broadcast of that TV show’s presentation file on the web, that he finds himself being the object of plagiarism reproaches and accusations made on the internet and within the french animation environment.
Fact is, he used a Miyazaki backdrop to illustrate one of his pictures. That scandal really struck Mark, and it has been a switch to him. From that day on, he decided to become his own and only reference, despite his lack of confidence, and his artistic youth.

In 2004, he starts painting with oilpaint, portraying friends, and faces his inner self and his potential that is still yet to come. Step by step, drowned in his studio’s shade, he learns to form his own eye and perception.

In 2005, he spreads his search to image and photography, through his band’s tours and the music videos he directs. That quest leads him through the U.S.A, Cuba, Russia, Japan. Back home, he transcribes his pictures in paintings in his parisian studio.

So it’s on the field that he eventually finds the themes that really fit his mind and really resemble him, such as american suburbs’/projects’ culture, drenched in the skateboard atmosphere which he practiced his whole youth. It’s like a rebirth to him, when he sets his eyes on the U.S. for real, the one he dreamed about, staring pictures and videos of it, when he was a kid. It is that universe that he sets on paper through his first novel « Helmet boy », published in 2007 by « Hugo and Cie». That novel won the prestigious Bourgogne’s litterary price the next year. That same year he also directs a short movie « Thelma », the sad story of a fat girl in the Los Angeles suburb, acruel and sensuel portrait of a bored youth, which will be rewarded by the 2008 best movie award during the « Paris Tout Court » festival.

Deeply inspired by the subcultures, and attracted to social minorities and the notion of « community », he leads his artistic stand towards themes often linked to some form of marginalization, a marginalization which he persist to sublimate , giving these unconventional peoples a rough beauty.
He has the will to show and underline the inner personality of men and women he runs into by chance during his wanderings. Through the potography, he isolates these characters out their context, and pull out of it an image fitting the emblematic characters that are scattered across his universe.
Pictures or paintings are tools that allow him to memorialize strangers and to raise them to an iconoclast stage. « I bring people home with me. They are features I meet for 10 minutes, only for the time of a picture, and whom will never leave me again ».

Mark Maggiori’s universe becomes more and more refined. He tries to make his artistic approach more and more unique, even if he agrees being eternally unsatisfied… which is maybe what drives him and makes him never to stop working.