Do you really know the works of Nicolas de Staël? The Paris Museum of Modern Art is betting that not. Paris is daring, certainly, but absolutely flamboyant, displaying before our eyes more than 200 masterpieces, nearly a third of which have never or very rarely been shown to the French public. Emotional sequence and revelation guaranteed. Throughout his career, Nicolas de Staël will never stop reinventing himself while maintaining a unique and recognizable style. A career which will nevertheless have the brilliance of a meteor whose crazy race will unfortunately end prematurely in Antibes where the painter, consumed by heartache, ends up committing the irreparable at the age of 41. This masterful retrospective paints the portrait of a painter on the razor's edge, having destroyed as many works as he created during his life. A tireless experimenter who admits to only moving forward from accident to accident, embarking on a pictorial quest of rare intensity which deliberately overturns the distinction between abstraction and figuration. If some can see in his work tangled flat areas of color and material, abstract, vivacious, organized, others on the contrary will learn to detect the stories hidden behind these falsely abstract masterpieces. Like here with this football stadium illuminated by nocturnal floodlights transposed into the XXL format of the greatest paintings in History, this painting of the Parc des Princes at night which still weighs 200 kilos of piles of paint... So yes, here we rediscover Nicolas de Staël as if we had never seen him. A small oil on canvas showing the blues of Provence right down to the overseas trees, a fiery sky at sunset, a view of a village immersed in the incandescence of the sky, a landscape of plains which merges with a sea of ice. It is all the magic of this artist who goes beyond the figuration to keep only the emotion, encapsulated in a living material, beyond the form. The painter does not shy away from any experience, facing the sun head on, showing what cannot be seen, looking differently, sculpting color as if he were tearing strips of material in a collage. Build space through color, raw, raw, daring to use white in an electric palette. A green sea, a red sky, reality doesn’t matter as long as emotion dominates. Little by little, his shades of gray give way to an electrifying palette, his tight writing and his strong impasto lighten, leaving only the brilliance of the star of the struck down Prince in the constellation of the History of the art.

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