Cultural Icons
The Louisiana Paintings of Francis Pavy
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL SARTISKY
If ever the light could transmute itself into sound, or conversely sound into color, the result would resolve itself into a painting rendered by lifelong Louisiana resident Francis X. Pavy of Lafayette. His palette reflects the brilliant sun-imbued hues of South Louisiana.
Canvasses vibrate with life and musical rhythm; they swirl and incandesce, like a zydeco club, the floor bouncing under boots and heels, glasses rattling, musical strains interweaving like rumor and suggestion. In the Pavy cosmos, paintings pound like oil wells pumping, like fists full of sweaty money, like a guitar traded for a soul, like a hound barking a the moon, like cane burning, like red piano illuminating the night.
“My work stems from the Southern narrative storytelling tradition,” Pavy says. “Common subjects for me are the folklife and folklore of the local people juxtapositioned against the fabric of popular American culture. I am particularly interested in music, musicians and the musical traditions of Louisiana and the South. Other subjects that I enjoy interpreting are outdoor activities such as hunting and fishing, Southern mysticism and religion, Mardi Gras, myths, romance and personal experiences. From my travels, I now know that a broad spectrum of people identify with my work. I feel that by touching the local or immediate experience, I have been able to touch the universal.”
Born in Lafayette on March 2, 1954, at about 6 months of age he moved with his family to Clery, France, in the Loire Valley. They lived there until 1956, returning to Lafayette. There, as a child Pavy studied painting under the great teacher, painter, and photographer, Elemore Morgan Jr. During his teenage years he studied photography and music while continuing to paint and draw. At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette he studied music, ceramics, animation, painting, printmaking and sculpture, finally graduating with a Fine Arts degree in sculpture.
Pavy worked in a glass shop, making leaded and beveled glass windows. After 5 years, he opened his own glass studio, which operated until 1988. Pavy did not begin painting in his own mature style until around 1985. His work has been featured in nearly three dozen individual shows in Louisiana, Texas, New York, Colorado, Switzerland, and France, and group shows and exhibitions in such diverse places as Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Japan. Today he is represented by the Arthur Roger Gallert in New Orleans.
Pavy’s work has occasioned significant notice in print. Articles referencing his work have been published including Art in America, Rolling Stone, Yahoo Internet Life, Gambit, Offbeat, Morning Advocate, The New Orleans Art Review, Times Picayune, Houston, Chronicle, and Louisiana Cultural Vistas.
A Louisiana original, Francis Pavy is a vital member of the current generation of Louisiana artists whose work not only retains crucial cultural references, but also is viscerally evocative precisely by virtue of these connections. The works’ abstract dimensions are profoundly grounded in Louisiana motifs and culture much as in Greek mythology the Titan Antaeus derived his strength from contact with his Mother Earth. As such it is simultaneously rich in its originality and iconographic in its very essence.