Born in 1970, Christophe Tixier, otherwise known as Peppone, is a French Canadian artist who lives near the beautiful French city of Aix-en-Provence.
He has often declared that the two most important elements in his art are colours and childhood, and he believes that all art of any worth must draw in some way on the artist’s own early years. Imagination, he says, is more important than a sharp mind, and your imagination is formed when you are a child.
Peppone’s vibrant and uplifting sculptures of familiar characters ask us to re-examine our conventional views of what art should be. His current collection pays homage to two beloved cartoon characters from when he was growing up, Mickey Mouse and Snoopy, but he is also inspired by other iconic comic book and movies characters including The Hulk, Zorro and Spiderman. He sculpts these characters using moulds he creates in his studio, then either mounts them in their own comics or stages them ‘dressed up as other heroes’, calling on everything from his favourite comic strips to the world famous pop art of Keith Haring.
A keen collector of comics and books of all kinds, Peppone was given 500 Tintin albums by his father and has gone on to visit hundreds of second hand or vintage book and magazine sales. Over the years, many friends, collectors and even strangers have augmented his collection too. He describes this accumulation of papers, often imbued with pop art symbolism redolent of his childhood, as his ‘paper heritage’ and uses it ‘ to create artistic encounters with our memories and our humanity.’
There is great humour and charm in Peppone’s work but there is also pathos. He points out that as the only living creature with awareness of our own mortality we do more than simply reproduce – we also communicate, create, dream and remember. He sees his sculpture as a way of linking us to our humanity by drawing these concepts together with stories, art, imagination and of course the important memories of childhood, his and ours, that form the basis of his inspiration.
