MICHEL MACRÉAU
SEPTEMBER, 2024
Solo Show
SHARE
PARIS
35 AVENUE MATIGNON
75008, FRANCE
Dumas+Limbach is pleased to present « Michel Macréau, Primitivisme moderne » a solo show in our Parisian gallery. On this occasion, we will showcase emblematic artworks of the French painter Michel Macreau.
Michel Macréau was born in Paris on July 21, 1935.
Raised as an only child by his mother, a furrier, and his father, a truck driver who was always absent, he was moved from family to family, and had an unstable childhood. One day, as a teenager, he stopped in a bookshop. Two art books caught his eye: one on Matisse, the other on Picasso. Influenced by these great artists, he began to paint.
After graduating in 1953, he first worked on cartoons for Le Corbusier's tapestries.
In 1962, the Galerie Raymond Cordier gave him his first solo exhibition. It was a resounding success: Georges Pompidou bought several paintings from him, and he took part in various group and solo exhibitions in France and abroad.
Just as a form of recognition seemed to be taking shape, it was suddenly called into question by the closure of galleries representing his work. The artist felt abandoned. Coupled with personal difficulties, he sank into depression and was forced to spend long periods in hospital.
“I wondered if what I was doing had any meaning, and even if it was art”, he would later confide.
MICHEL MACREAU
Tireuse de langue, 1964
Oil on canvas
65 x 50 cm
MICHEL MACREAU
Personnages, 1966
Gouache on paper
92 x 59 cm
Centered on the human figure, his works are essentially portraits. Resemblance is of little importance to him; it's the expression of the body, the mind and its pain that emanate from his symbol-filled figures.
Success finally came in 1993. He was introduced to Alain Margaron following the opening of his gallery. The meeting was intense and productive. Numerous exhibitions followed. But it was brutally cut short by the artist's death on November 19, 1995.
Thus, in the form of an apparently primitive figuration, Michel Macréau is recognized as the precursor of Figuration Libre and urban graffiti, in the vein of Basquiat and Combas, whom he preceded and influenced.
Macréau finds his way in the wake of a primitivism inspired by the elementary, spontaneous graphics of children's productions, while building his art through a virulent and fertile confrontation with the masters, principally Picasso.
MICHEL MACREAU
Visages, 1965
Oil on canvas
73 x 54 cm
MICHEL MACREAU
Visage au bras levé, 1965
Oil on canvas
66 x 86 cm
MICHEL MACREAU
Portrait d'homme, 1965
Oil on canvas
65 x 50 cm
It was at the end of the 19th century, as Europe was building up empires in Africa, Oceania and Asia, that colonizers began to take an interest in local art, described fairly quickly as “primitive” or even “tribal”. At the time, these terms reflected a condescending view of objects far removed from European canons.
However, they aroused the curiosity, and even a real infatuation, of renowned Western artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who saw in them the possibility of emancipating themselves from a certain formalism and the dictates of realism, notably through the representation of figures or objects.
Beyond the initial amazement of a few Western artists, the so-called primitive arts exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century artistic production, notably that of Michel Macréau.
Through the notion of primitivism, a real dialogue takes shape on the art of this period, leading to a critical view, a form of “modern primitivism” of which Macréau is a key protagonist.
" The first impulse is reality: the body, me, what I see... Then abstract signs and symbols arrive. Very quickly, I move from reality to symbols, then to colors, to lines, then back to reality. There's a constant to-ing and fro-ing between these different forms of writing "
Quotation from Michel Macreau
