Patrick Fontana began taking dnotes dessinées during seminars in philosophy, art aesthetics and sociology. These notes consist of a drawing linked to a fragment of a text read or heard during a talk. Taken in the moment, they are a way of putting words or texts into images, which then engage a plastic work.
(seminars by Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri..., based on books by Gilles Deleuze, Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Christophe Bertossi, Spinoza, Anna Tsing, Karl Marx... ).
Since the creation of the video-performance GRENZE, based on notes dessinées from Marx's Capital, in 2004, with Pierre-Yves Fave, he has continued to create an interface between his artistic practice and the social field through the Lecture(s) de bouche(s) workshop, which records readings aloud and celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2024.
This workshop is the source of the digital installations Desintégration(s), Lecture(s) de bouche(s), en redevenir féroce et sauvage...
He received the Coup de Cœur de l'Académie Charles Cros in 2014 for LUCA BABEL, audio CD, poems by Ghérasim Luca, with people learning French as a foreign language at the Emmaüs-Solidarité association in Paris.
He is the author of the digital app Ethica, of work without obstacles, of Spinoza's Ethics, an international project between art and the humanities. Since it went online in November 2018, more than 62,000 people from 110 countries around the world have visited the free Ethica app of barrier-free work and its website.
