Roger Edgar Gillet, la grande dérision

In post-World War II Paris, Gillet began his career by throwing himself wholeheartedly into the informal or lyrical abstraction movement. He experimented with a pictorial paste mixed with sand and skin glue, which allowed him to achieve sumptuous textural effects. Whether he was streaking paint with a knife, working on solidly masonry surfaces, or deploying complex, swirling compositions, he experimented relentlessly and played with the expressive effects of paint.

In the early 1960s, Gillet 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 era, initially earned him the incredulity of gallery owners and critics, who conveniently labeled him an “expressionist.” He portrayed a gaunt and zany humanity, indistinct, barely extracted from the pictorial clay from which it originated. He captured the theater of life with vitriol: crowds of starving people, judges and bailiffs, carnival parades... His work explored the traditional genres of painting (portraiture, history painting, urban landscapes), but each subject was scrutinized with fierce humor.

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. Resisting any classification, Gillet declared: “The important thing is to disturb the gaze.”