Ketabi Bourdet is honored to dedicate its second participation at TEFAF Maastricht to the artist Guy de Rougemont (1935-2021), whose work was the subject of a retrospective at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris last summer and of a major monograph written by Gay Gassmann and published on September 6 by Norma Editions.
Guy de Rougemont's abstract works bear witness to a long companionship with color, born of the artist's early encounter with the luminous watercolors of J. M. William Turner in London museums and with the shimmering palettes of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. During a long stay in New York, between 1965 and 1966, the artist, steeped in European traditions, came face to face with the radical forms and flat colors of American minimalist and pop artists Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert Indiana, among others, which led him to definitively choose abstraction as the territory of exploration that allowed him to express his curiosity as a painter without limit.
Painting is the core of Guy de Rougemont's artistic practice, which he transforms into volume to “make light and color react, the real problem of painting”, as in the curves of his serpentine sculptures, which cut light beams in three-dimensional space. The simpler and more recognizable the artist's geometric shapes, the more vibrant and lively the color, tamed by the colorist.
“I believe in the modifying power of a color, of the meeting of a curve and a straight line, of a touch of light”, notes the artist in his notebooks. His deepest doubts are expressed on canvas, where the fruits of countless hours spent in the solitude of his studio ripen. “In the temporality of time's flight, in the vigor of our painterly curiosities, I understood that I would be a painter forever” he writes serenely.
A fine selection of paintings and works on paper recount the artist's peregrinations, which begin with the curvilinear forms of the ellipse, intersected by straight lines to create surfaces conducive to the reception of solid color. From the 1970s onwards, straight lines took over from curves for the next thirty years, during which time the artist deployed an infinite number of geometric grids in which light and shadow resonated, in a perfect ambivalence between the fixity of the surface and the transience of color.
The artist's meditation on the non-finito, explored before him by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, leaves unfinished parts on his canvases, emphasizing the completion of the full. These poetic works symbolize the underlying ambiguity that characterizes his work as a whole, in constant tension between his rigorous spirit and his rebellious nature as a dreamy artist. From the 2000s onwards, the artist returned to fluid forms and nuanced colors, with a personal interpretation of the linea serpentinata used by the 16th-century Italian Mannerist masters Pontormo, Bronzino and il Parmigianino, the culmination of a sixty-year journey through the different states of color. Guy de Rougemont died in 2021, leaving behind him a formal universe of his own, in constant flux between artistic tradition and aesthetic rupture.