Olivier Debré (1920-1999)
A major French painter on the art scene in the second half of the 20th century, Olivier Debré’s monumental, colorful, non-figurative work is an exact reflection of the way we experience reality. His vast canvases, composed of large swathes of fluid color, bring him closer to the “color-field painting” of American abstract expressionists such as Morris Louis and Clifford Still. His black-and-white etchings retain a very painterly feel.
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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