Exhibition at Beddington Fine Art, Bargemon
Michel Carlin
"Mémoire de Corps"
From 27th May until 21st July 2007, Beddington Fine Art of Bargemon, near Draguignan in the Var, host an important selection of recent works from 2006/7 by the highly-respected Michel Carlin, who as a young artist in the ?50s worked with Fernand Léger and exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Giacometti, and, in the ?60s with, among others, Miró , Tapiès, and César.
?Mémoire de Corps? is the collective title Carlin chose many years ago to incorporate his intense observation and raw exposure of the existential human condition ? experienced at first hand as an eight year old, when witnessing the apocalyptic aftermath of the Allied bombardment of his home town, Chambéry, in 1943.
Carlin would later write that, in hindsight, it was this that triggered his urge to paint.
Carlin?s opus alludes to and follows in the tradition of the great 19th century artists, Delacroix and Géricault, and his paintings testify to a personal and artistic battle to afford a form of immortality to these ephemeral beings that appear to float in a state of quiescent limbo somewhere between life and death.
A faultless technique and a loving and almost compulsive reworking of impasto in the sensitive quest for perfection without pretention reveals successive strata of bitumen, oil paints, glacis and crayon that overlay each other to complete each stanza of this epic poem of chilling beauty, human torment and suffering; the word made flesh??bodies sometimes doubled up, turned away from the viewer, who must find his or her own words of reaction.
Carlin?s ?Memoire de Corps?
represents an important landmark in contemporary figurative painting
and should stand the test of time for its altruistic depiction of man?s
ongoing struggle
for understanding and grace.
"Mémoire de Corps"
30th May until 21st July 2007
Open Weds to Sat 10 to 12pm and 4 to 7pm.
Beddington
Fine Art
Les Remparts
83830 Bargemon, Var
Tel
04 94 76 64 06
Email : contact@beddingtonfineart.com
www.beddingtonfineart.com
