Guy Departe

Guy Departe

Guy Departe was born in 1938, near Reims. It was in a gray boarding school, in the midst of the scarcely more colorful fifties, that he contracted the painting virus. And it is undoubtedly because of this ambient gray that his masters, when he entered painting, were the impressionists, painters of light and color.

From them he retained, in the painting of his maturity, an obvious pleasure in the shades of the south; a daily use of the blues of the Mediterranean, pulsating reds, and organic greens. Therefore, it is no coincidence that since 1994, he has lived and worked in Fréjus, in the Var.

Although not to be qualified as abstract, Guy Departe is non-figurative. Built around landscape references (sometimes also figures or objects), his works are often like the magmatic emergence of an unsatisfied unconscious that springs forth on the canvas, like the overflow of the unspoken of a silent adolescence.

At the limit of expressionism, he seeks to translate tremors and vibrations, where the external world, without being denied, is passed through the sieve of his own sensitivity, of his personal illumination.

Primarily a colorist, although forms are inseparable from colors in his vision and approach to art, he lets them interact with each other to give birth to a whole, evident in its structure and balance.

It is worth noting that Guy Departe can work on his canvases for several years to find the desired nuance, the desired perfection.

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES

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