“He transmitted his life force to me”: Catherine Ringer auctions off a hundred works by her father, the unknown painter Sam Ringer, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who “incenses colors” in his paintings.
“My father loved Jérôme Bosch, Max Ernst, but he was also a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci for making many things out of painting,” confesses the singer found by AFP on the walls of Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr, in Paris. , place of this auction on March 29.
The story of this versatile man, also a sculptor, engraver, among other talents, who died in 1986, is well known to fans of Rita Mitsouko. everything is in the song he was a man. “He was looking for the memory of him at that time,” says the artist.
The Fine Arts, before the concentration camps
“He was born in 1918 in Poland, he spent his youth in Oswiecim (a town near the Auschwitz camp), he was of Jewish origin, not particularly religious, born of an unknown father, lived with his grandmother, his mother had gone to work”. a very anti-Semitic time, he was accepted into Fine Arts in Krakow, he won a first prize in drawing,” he continues. Before puffing, moved, “then he was a victim of the Nazis.”
Sam Ringer went through nine concentration camps between 1940 and 1945 before being liberated by the Russians. After his convalescence-“he treated dysentery, lung diseases…”-he left in 1947 for Paris, “the dream of artists”.
“Paris Dream”
There he met at Beaux-Arts who became the mother of Catherine Ringer. “He was a refugee, who had no money, sometimes he painted at first on canvases from recovered mattresses. My mother, who worked in an architect studio, would pay her for good quality canvases, which annoyed her a lot”, the singer smiles.
“He is someone who had this dramatic story but it is not what we see in his painting, on the contrary, he exalted life, colors, and transmitted his vital force to me.”
And describe the painting behind her where Sam Ringer, who looks like David Crosby, “represents himself towards the end of his life in his studio, in his dream of Paris, Montmartre, searching for the sacred fire, the light.” .
Sam Ringer has worked in all formats, miniatures or large dimensions, navigating from the abstract -which seems “not so abstract” to his daughter- to the phantasmagorical figurative. In the table reminiscences, Catherine Ringer is pictured as a baby. Sam Ringer has made several forays into the world of Rita Mitsouko. “I have always loved what my father did, since I was 15 years old, as soon as he could, he showed me around what he did.”
magic lantern and punks
For the clip of a Rita hit, marcia dances, the singer “orders ghosts” to him. He creates characters out of limbo, on a human scale, in cut plywood. Only one appears briefly in the video (from 1 min. 07). For “the decorator and director of the clip”, cold, these creatures do not enter “into the atmosphere of the clip”, recalls Catherine Ringer.
For one of Rita Mitsouko’s first concerts at the Gibus hall in Paris, Sam Ringer projects her drawings and paintings on the walls using “a magic lantern” made by him. “It was the clash of cultures, there were friends of his with chic trench coats and the punks with crests from the Gibus who jumped everywhere”, rewinds the sixty-year-old.
“J’arrive à un moment de ma vie où il faut que j’agisse, que je sorte des placards ces toiles, là avec cette vente, c’est la bonne occasion de faire beaucoup pour l’oeuvre de mon père”, he concluded -she.
Source: BFM TV
