Guy Departe: The Man with the Hat

A work that suddenly appears around the corner of a room, the gaze that captures more than the canvas reveals, a full and complete sensation of understanding from a memory one does not possess: an artistic love at first sight.

With light as his only guide, he traverses the landscape with the strength of the expressionists and the softness of a modern impressionist. Drawing from Rouault this notion of color/expression, he has managed to combine, by working in parallel on a body of work on paper (gouaches, inks, and watercolors) and a body of work on canvas and wood (oils and acrylics), the exuberance of gestural painters and the patience of those who rework a canvas over several years.
Moving from an obvious figurative to a refined abstract, he offers a revisitation of non-conceptual abstract painting that is expressed in his work with great delicacy and sensitivity. For far from a methodical or thematic reflection, Departe's painting is a union of feelings and soul tremors brought to the canvas as the expression not of a desire, but of a personal language.

Guy Departe, Small Format 03, 2009

Guy Departe, Medium Format 53, 2010

In the abstract of Guy Departe, there are all the imprints of a life: from the dreams of adolescence to the uncertainties of maturity. There is the absolute and the reality of the painter, an artisan of his own emotions that he distills, analyzes, and delivers to us, fearing both not to be seen and to be too well understood; unmasked.
Guy Departe traverses the shores of creation like an explorer. He prospects, studies, tries, paints, then starts over until he has before his eyes a work in harmony with himself.
Perfectionist, demanding, bubbling, his abstract possesses the qualities – strength, balance, structure, dense imagination, softness, sense of color – that make him a painter of uncommon dimension. To be discovered...

© Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES