Olivier Debré (1920-1999)
A major French painter of the second half of the 20th century, Olivier Debré's monumental, colorful, non-figurative work is an exact reflection of the real world. His vast canvases, composed of large areas of fluid colors, bring him closer to the "color-field painting" of American abstract expressionists, such as Morris Louis, or Clifford Still. His black and white engraved work retains very pictorial accents.
Works of art by the artist Olivier Debré
Biography of artist Olivier Debré
"From density to transparency, from paste to fluid matter, from the vertical of signs-personages to the horizontal of signs-landscapes, to arrive at the sumptuous explosion of signs-spaces, Debré's entire pictorial approach thus moves from matter to the ineffable, from contained force to the delicacy of the mental landscape."
Olivier Debré is a French painter born in 1920. He began drawing and painting as a child. "As a child, I always painted and sculpted. It seemed my natural mode of expression. I was comfortable with it. In 1938, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in the architecture section, in the studio of his maternal uncle Jacques Debat-Ponsan. During the war, in the early 1940s, in his family's cradle in Touraine, he was drawn back to painting. "During this troubled period of the war, I was there, in this Touraine where I had always gone as a child, and I went back down into the field and painted, simply, like that. In painting, I had a need for direct expression and physical communication with nature".
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