Roger-Edgar Gillet - Guignol's band - Espace Paul Rebeyrolle

Espace Paul Rebeyrolle, Eymoutiers, France 4 June - 5 November 2023 
Espace Paul Rebeyrolle, Eymoutiers, France https://www.espace-rebeyrolle.com/
A friendship developed between Gillet and Rebeyrolle in the 1960s, facilitated by the complicity between Thérèse Laisné and Papou Tellikdjian, their respective partners. In La Havana, they shared a powerful experience in 1967, marked by the creation of a large mural with 98 other artists from the Salon de mai, in a festive atmosphere.
 
Today, the invitation of the Espace Paul Rebeyrolle seals their common passion for a powerful painting, committed for Rebeyrolle, ironic and marked by derision for Gillet.
Guignol's band presents 28 works, painted between 1951 and 1997 and rarely exhibited, including Un Tas de gens (1966), an important painting on loan from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.
 
From the École Boulle, where he learned engraving on medals, to the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, he first admired Bonnard and Vuillard, then Kandinsky and Mondrian.
From the beginning of the 1960s, Gillet left abstraction to turn to expressive figuration. During a trip to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, he was struck by a portrait of a bishop painted by Greco

"Faced with the wickedness of this gaze, I told myself that with abstract painting, we were losing something: we could no longer paint the depth of a gaze.