(1920 – 1999)

Since the end of 2016, all the works in the Debré Donation, made to Tours Métropole Val de Loire by the artist’s heirs, have joined the CCC OD.

Olivier Debré was born in Paris into a family of doctors and artists. He began painting and drawing as a child, and then turned to a career in architecture. In 1938, he graduated from the Paris School of Fine Arts in the architecture section. However, he decided to devote himself to painting.

His pictorial expression, initially inspired by Impressionism, evolved towards more open compositions with large areas of colour, making Debré one of the exponents of gestural abstraction. Despite travelling extensively around the world, he often returned to paint near the Loire, at Vernou-sur-Brenne, near Tours, in the “Madères” estate where he had set up one of his studios.

Stripped of all anecdote, Olivier Debré’s painting is a painting of space and light. The titles he uses are the evocative expression of an emotion linked to a moment, a place and embodied by a chromatic atmosphere. In this way, we are very close to the landscape, and already in the landscape, whose limits and horizon have been pushed beyond the field of the painting. The viewer is thus truly at the centre of an immense detail.

But they are also at the centre of the painting to which the deceptively innocuous titles refer. They describe it as it appears in its materiality: all thickness and transparency. It never ceases to assert itself first and foremost as a painted surface on which the gesture is inscribed. The phenomenon increases with the format. Everything is painting.