(Paris) “He transmitted his life force to me”: the French musician Catherine Ringer is auctioning around a hundred works by her father, the little-known painter Sam Ringer, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who “praised colors” in his paintings.
“My father loved Jérôme Bosch, Max Ernst, but he was also a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci for the manufacture of many things outside of painting”, confides the singer met by AFP in the walls of Bonhams Cornette of Saint Cyr, in Paris, place of this auction on March 29.
The story of this jack-of-all-trades father, also a sculptor, engraver, among other talents, who died in 1986, is known to fans of Rita Mitsouko, the rock group she founded with Fred Chichin (died in 2007) , one of the most popular in France in the 80s. It’s all in the song “C’tait un homme”. “I was looking for his memory at that time,” says the artist.
“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, he lived with his grandmother, his mother had gone to work. “In a very anti-Semitic era, he was accepted at the Fine Arts in Krakow, he had a first prize in drawing,” she continues. Before continuing, moved, “then he was a victim of the Nazis”.
Sam Ringer passed through nine concentration camps between 1940 and 1945 before being released by the Russians. After his convalescence – “he treated dysentery, lung diseases…” – he left in 1947 for Paris, “the dream of artists”.
“Dream of Paris”
There he met at the Beaux-Arts the one who became the mother of Catherine Ringer. “He was a refugee, who didn’t have any money, he sometimes painted at first on salvaged ticking. My mother, who worked in an architect’s studio, then paid him for good quality canvas, which annoyed him a lot, ”said the singer with a smile.
“He’s someone who had this dramatic story, but that’s not what you see in his painting. On the contrary, he praised life, colors, and transmitted his life force to me”.
Behind her, a painting where Sam Ringer “represents himself towards the end of his life in his studio, in his dream of Paris, Montmartre, seeking the sacred fire, the light”, she describes.
Sam Ringer has worked on all formats, miniatures or large dimensions, sailing from the abstract – which his daughter finds “not so abstract” – to the phantasmagorical figurative.
In the painting 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, as soon as I could, I showed around me what he was doing”.
Magic lantern and punks
For the clip of a Rita hit, Marcia Baila, the singer “orders ghosts” from him. He creates characters out of limbo, on a human scale, on cut plywood. Only one appears briefly in the video (from 1 min. 07). For “the decorator and the director of the clip”, chilly, these creatures do not enter “in the atmosphere of the clip”, remembers Catherine Ringer.
For one of the first concerts of Rita Mitsouko in the Parisian hall of the Gibus, Sam Ringer projects on the walls his drawings and paintings using “a magic lantern” made by him. “It was a clash of cultures, there were friends of his in chic raincoats and the crested punks from the Gibus jumping everywhere,” explains the sixty-year-old.
“I’m coming to a time in my life where I have to act, that I take these canvases out of the cupboards; there, with this sale, it’s a good opportunity to do a lot for my father’s work”, she concludes.