Maurice Estève
Paintings 1929–1994
22–25 October 2015
FIAC
Grand Palais
Paris
3 November–19 December 2015
Applicat-Prazan Rive gauche
16 rue de Seine
75006 Paris
France
Applicat-Prazan Rive droite
14 avenue Matignon
75008 Paris
France
T +33 1 43 25 39 24
F +33 1 43 25 39 25
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At each edition of the Paris FIAC Art Fair, Applicat-Prazan presents a solo exhibition of works by an important figure of post-war art who worked in Paris. This year the gallery will present a selection of 24 paintings by Maurice Estève. His art is decidedly non-figurative and apprehends a sensitive and transmuting expression of emotion by a subtle exercise in colour.
A catalogue has been published for the occasion with a text by Germain Viatte, General Curator, curator of numerous exhibitions and leading author. Germain Viatte writes: “Estève adopted a rigorous formal vocabulary softened by a subtle harmony of curves and colours…” A video has been produced by Sylvie Boulloud.
Maurice Estève was born in 1904 in central France. At the age of 9, after a visit to the Louvre, he decided to become a painter. ”From then on I observed nature through the painting of the great masters.” In spite of the disapproval of his parents, he attended the Colarossi Academy in Montparnasse and later participated regularly in the Paris Salon des Surindépendants.
Inspired by Cézanne, Estève showed his first still lifes in the 1920s and, in the 1930s his shapes and perspectives became more geometric, connected in successive sequences of planes. Estève later adopted a meticulous and calm formal language with subtle harmonic curves and colours. From about 1947 he moved on to a new phase of non-figurative expression towards a formal stylization of poetic forms and light.
It is in his mastery of colours that Estève has left his mark on the painting of his period by orchestrating colours. The organisation of his compositions represents the essence of the moment in which the work was created. “I never make sketches, I paint directly on the canvas without any preliminary drawings. The colour finds its place at the same time as the shapes. Each element seeks its place on the work in progress…Each painting is a sequence of metamorphoses…”
A metamorphosis also expressed through the titles of his works. Berlougane, Bringuenailles, Ouachita-Swing, Ratuel, Roulti were his own inventions that reveal and accompany the existence of the works. Estève sought names of hamlets or localities, inventing or transforming their poetic sounds and emanating an aura of organic mystery.
The exhibition presents a coherent representation of Estève’s paintings of the 1970s with Trigourrec (1972) “…a work that opens this period during which the painter overcame his initial difficulty in finding his personal form of expression.” Estève explained that while he was working or simply taking a break to look at a canvas, he had the impression that he was unable to see what the painting expressed or understand what was being revealed.
Estève said he was much more interested in light than in colour and that having discovered the particularity of abstraction which is meant to be instinctive and intimately conceptual, his abstraction is dissimilar to that of other painters of his period because it defies dry geometry or mathematical speculation, it does not seek the dazzling immediacy of movement, nor the effect of matter for its own sake.
Maurice Estève died in Culan in 2001 leaving a magnificent and poetical art-form composed of 818 oils on canvas included in the catalogue raisonné published by Robert Maillard and Monique Prudhomme-Estève in 1995.
About Applicat-Prazan
Bernard Prazan, founded the gallery in 1989. Since its inception Applicat-Prazan specialises exclusively in top quality works by post-war artists such as:
Jean-Michel Atlan, Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Maurice Estève, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Jean Hélion, Asger Jorn, Wifredo Lam, André Lanskoy, Alberto Magnelli, Alfred Manessier, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Serge Poliakoff, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Victor Vasarely, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, and Zao Wou-Ki.
In 2004 Franck Prazan, former Managing Director of Christie’s, took over the reins of the gallery.
