Artists

Roger-Edgar Gillet

Press release

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present the second exhibition of Roger-Edgar Gillet (1924-2004), a painter from the Second School of Paris, whose prolific career ranged from lyrical abstraction in the 1950s to an expressionist figuration close to Jean Fautrier, Zoran Mušič, Eugène Leroy and Paul Rebeyrolle. In collaboration with the artist's estate, Une Figuration Autre sheds light on a body of work that is emblematic of his oeuvre, spanning the early 1960s to the more mature paintings of the late 1990s.

When we look at Gillet's paintings, the first thing we notice is their materiality. This sensation, which "penetrates the body by way of the eyes," as the painter said, echoes the sensations he experienced in his youth. As a child, he watched the baker knead the dough, the poster paster smears the sheet, and the worker laboriously crushing the tar onto the ground with his spatula-fascinating sights. He transferred these emotions, which were correlated with material, to painting, a medium that gradually became central to his artistic practice. While retaining these early impressions of an intense relationship with matter, the works on display also offer a profound reflection on the possibilities of a new figuration.

For half a century, R.-E. Gillet devoted himself to painting. The artist began his studies at the École Boulle, then went on to the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where he acquired "a taste for things well done, technique and means of expression," he declared. In 1950, the young painter had a decisive encounter with Charles Estienne and Michel Tapié, critics and theoreticians of art informel. In those years, he participated in the then booming movement of lyrical abstraction, while also maintaining a certain distance from it, in his need to confront reality: faces and other silhouettes emerge from the lively brushwork of his early paintings. It was also at this time that the artist developed a chromatic palette of ochres and browns, which he would continue to favor throughout his 50-year career. The "rough" aspect of his canvases-due to the use of sand, pebbles, and rabbit-skin glue-is also very much in evidence. It brings to mind the work of Jean Dubuffet, whose "radical rejection of accepted notions of 'ugly' and 'beautiful' Gillet shared at the time."¹