Our Artists starting with Gi Gi.

Gigi

Gigi Vercellino-Rinaldi was born on the April 10th of 1942 in Beausset, France. She spends her childhood there, mixing with the artistic circle from the Var.

In 1970, she meets her husband Michel, sculptor, musician, and whose grandfather is the famous impressionist painter Léonard Bordes ( the generation following Van Gogh, Gaughin, Matisse, Manet and Monet).

In 1975, Gigi leaves the Cote d'Azur to reach Corsica ( known as beauty island), which is her husband's homeland. They get their residence built there, a splendid provencal-styled villa, in which one could admi.re many masterpieces, paret of this family's legacy. Gigi focuses on raising her two sons and on improving the well-being of their home for the next twenty years.

In 1990, her children now grown up, Gigi can finally dedicate herself to her hobby »Painting », and she starts to attend intensive classes for more than fifteen years. Once the basis mastered, she fulfills herself through the art. Her creations, which produce an intense emotion, are the fruit of her mood of the moment. The canvas is rich and sustained, the strokes are clear, and the use of the pigments offers surprising colours. Due to an allergic reaction to oil paint, she only works with acrylic paint or watercolours. Her work is signed Gigi or Mami.

In 2005, for the first time, she exhibits a few pieces in a private viewing at an art gallery. Visitors do not remain unmoved by her paintings and she meets an immediate success.

Most of her work is displayed in her villa but in a few luxury establishments as well, such as the Ryad l'Etoile d'Orient at Marrakech ( www.etoiledorient.com) and La Villa Mahana at Bora Bora (www.villamahana.com), meeting point of a world wide Jet Set.

In 2004 she arrives for the first time in French Polynesia, to pay her son Damien a visit, Villa Mahana's owner. The charms of the way of life, the landscapes and the generous abundance of the nature reminds her of Eden, and will be the point of departure of a whole collection dedicated to them. Her son introduces J.C to her, a character of Polynesian art, in terms of sculpture and pearls engraving, who knows what he is doing and does it in style when explaining and perpetuating the Tahitian myth.

She will be moved by the way he lives, somehow original: he makes use of the benefit from the sells of his work to finance his own expeditions accross the different archipels of the Pacific to gather as many informations as he can in order to piece together the History and Culture of the Oceanian Triangle, which has been lost due to non-written handing down.

Gigi has chosen to back him in this quest, marginal but majestic, lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the lasts explorers extincted, leaving it unfinished.Therefore, the benefit related to the sell of each of her paintings displayed here, at La Villa Mahana, will support the sculptor J.C to assuage his thirst of knowledge. The patronage between artists is born...

« One can distinguish the greatness of an artist when his work, beyond his own subjective whim, is destined to light up and to ennoble the human kind »