Added Sep 17, 2007
Gérard Gentou
An artist whose use of colour is inspired
Gérard Gentou is now fifty years old and emanates the peace of a person at one with his clod of earth and his homeland. Everything about him exudes the ultimate elegance, the type of elegance borne of true geniality, which is obvious at the very first glance. But don’t let yourself be taken in! The “man of the world” mask conceals an almost despotic humour and enthusiasm.
“As a child I wanted to draw because no one listened to me”, he explains. “The desire to create something of beauty – that was my goal. That was the only thing that interested me. For me painting beautiful pictures was a way of preserving and paying tribute to nature, the flowers, landscapes, the world of minerals and plants. As I lived in the South, the females around me fascinated me – their clothing and their colours. As a youth I plunged into black & white, expressed myself in symbols resembling Chinese script. That was my way of writing, of expressing those things over which I would otherwise have drawn a veil of silence. When I then came to Paris as quite a young man, there was no more colour in my life. In order to be able to live to my taste, I worked during the day and painted at night. Initially I tended more towards realism than abstract painting, as I wanted to tell stories. I found a kind of equilibrium, a frame, in this type of expression. At that time I plunged head over heels into a red spot. I drew unremittingly: chess games, especially kings and solitary knights on gigantic chessboards, but also portraits of women who originated from some planet or other in the baroque Middle Ages – decorated with opulent precious stones and furnished with wild hairstyles. Even then one could already observe the great significance of costume in my universe.”
“In the 1990s I returned to colour via pastel, ink and gouache. With great élan I began working on playing cards, the main focus continuing to be the figures and their costumes. After one of my trips to Argentina, I managed to overcome my mental blocks. I generated works for hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds, created queens, kings and their entire royal suite, all in the fluo style. The mirror effect of the card and the double personality rendered every daring experiment possible. The abstract was suddenly there, but totally inverted: angels clothed in Kabuki looked half Aborigine and half Japanese; initially I waived the facial features, then the silhouettes themselves. My transition to pure abstract art of course took place via minerals and plants. And thus the circle was again complete.”
“Today”, explains Gérard Gentou, “I create small-format, geometric figures. Almost like a goldsmith I engrave masterpieces on paper. However, I also work with material. I am currently in the preparation phase for a project, which I would soon like to develop on a large scale – in this way I will transfer from the eternally small to the eternally large. I don’t want to say anything more on the subject,” he closes with a smile. “It’s never a bad thing to keep a little something to oneself.”
During the course of the years Gérard Gentou abandoned the terribly mature style of his chess games and other black and white portraits, which he displayed in his exhibitions in the Salon des Illustrateurs and in the Galerie La Passerelle in 1982 and 1984. As the aesthete who created hyperrealism, this artist opted for a surfeit of colour. After several exhibitions dealing with the themes of “Playing cards” and “Angels”, which were held in 1996 in Aquarius and 1997 in the “Les 100 ciels” gallery, Gérard Gentou then focused more than ever on the explosion of subversive nuances. With a gaiety very much reminiscent of the 1960s, his personalities dance a mixture of mambo and rap, which runs counter to every current, the style bringing new life into old well-worn prototypes. This power, lyricism and poetry can also be found in his abstract works, which are impressive both due to their wealth of form and due to the unexpressed dimension in them.
Although Gérard Gentou is mellow and docile in appearance, his works express such a genial enjoyment, energy and an avant-gardism, which convince one that this man is very much capable of living the paradox of his preference for traditional painting as well as his future-oriented visions.
Gérard Gentou, a man of series and passions, paints for his own enjoyment – and it is precisely this enjoyment that comes across in his work.
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