Roger Edgar Gillet : La grande dérision

Roger Edgar Gillet (Paris, 1924 - Saint-Suliac, 2004) is an iconic painter of the second half of the 20th century in France, yet he remains relatively unknown to the general public. This exhibition, organized jointly by the musée Estrine and the musée des beaux-arts de Rennes, is the first retrospective monograph produced by museums since the artist's death.

 

Roger Edgar Gillet trained at the École Boulle and then at the école nationale des arts décoratifs, before becoming a drawing teacher at the Académie Julian. This training gave him a taste for pictorial skill and a mastery of the craft that he would retain throughout his career. In the context of post-World War II Paris, Gillet began his career by fully embracing the informal or lyrical abstraction movement. He frequented Georges Mathieu, Charles Estienne, and Michel Tapié, and held his first solo exhibition in 1953 at the Craven Gallery. He experimented with a pictorial paste mixed with sand and skin glue, which allowed him to achieve sumptuous textural effects. Whether he was applying paint with a knife, working in solidly masoned surfaces, or deploying complex, swirling compositions, he experimented relentlessly and played with the expressive effects of paint.

 

Around 1958, Gillet's painting gradually began to reveal, almost in spite of himself, the shape of a face and the persistence of a gaze. In the early 1960s, he fully embraced a return to figurative art, driven by a need to affirm the power of the human gaze. This reversal, which went against the grain of the times, initially earned him the incredulity of gallery owners and critics, and he was conveniently described as an "expressionist." Gillet paints a portrait of a gaunt and zany humanity, indistinct, barely extracted from the pictorial clay from which it originated. He captures the theater of life with vitriol: crowds of starving people, judges and bailiffs, carnival parades... His work explores traditional genres of painting (portraiture, history painting, urban landscapes), but each subject is scrutinized with fierce humor: in this way, the artist manages to offer what could be a history painting of the 20th century. He draws on his keen knowledge of art history to absorb the examples of the many masters he references: Rembrandt, Zurbaran, Goya, Manet, Ensor... A true iconophagous painter, he draws inspiration from both the paintings he sees in museums and the images he glimpses on television, which undoubtedly explains why his painting creates tension between a universal dimension and the contemporary world events that affect it (wars, overpopulation, famines, etc.). 

 

From 1982 onwards, Gillet spent his summers in Saint-Malo, then bought a house in Saint-Suliac in Ille-et-Vilaine, where he lived until the end of his life. The presence of the coastline inspired him to create a series of storms in which he found a balance between abstraction and figuration, allowing him to display his virtuosity in pictorial treatment. In 1996, in a final swing of the pendulum among the incessant back-and-forths that marked his practice, he returned to the primacy of the human figure with a series of extremely powerful heads. Refusing to be classified, Gillet declared: "The important thing is to disturb the gaze." The exhibition will be presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes from June 27 to September 20, 2026.

 

A 192-page catalog will be published by Liénart.