Will you be able to look away from the deformed characters of Roger-Edgar Gillet? A masterful exhibition that revives the ferocious poetry of this unclassifiable artist, a time sensitive to the song of lyrical abstraction, before finally embracing, at the dawn of the 60s, a brutal, expressionist and suggestive figuration. From this lightning shift into abstraction, Gillet will have retained a leg, a thick touch, a sacrificial violence, but not only. The painter's natural inclination for the formless as well as his penchant for the dark worlds of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor allow him above all to "tyrannize the portrait" with complete impunity, as he so loved to recall. Between Les Nains, Les Bigotes and Les Juges, the artist thus willingly yields in his painting to his creative impulses, immortalizing under his brushes the image of a terribly monstrous and decadent society. Caught up as much by this Heap of People, a chilling allusion to the deportations of the Second World War, as by the evocation of the book by Céline Guignol's band, where a burlesque crowd from the slums of London bursts in with a crash, here we too are devoured by this material, absorbed by the ocher and earthy tones of his palette, sketched by this biting line that made Gillet a formidable chronicler of the 20th century.

ESPACE PAUL REBEYROLLE
From June 4 to November 5, 2023
Route de Nedde, 87120 Eymoutiers