olivier debré. un voyage en norvège
With the exhibition “Olivier Debré. Un voyage en Norvège”, presented in the galerie blanche, the ccc od has chosen to show a little-known and surprising facet of the painter’s work. Although Debré travelled to Norway on several occasions between 1966 and 1998, his paintings there have until now received very little attention in France. Although the prism of the travelling painter has often been used to approach his painting, it seems that historiography has overlooked this destination, which is nonetheless one of the most recurrent and, plastically, one of the richest.
Although the artist travelled extensively throughout his career, it was in the Loire that he found an unchanging point of anchorage, leaving it only to return again and again. Debré’s presence at ccc od now embodies this eternal return to the Loire. The Loire is the central mental landscape in Debré’s work, the epicentre of this insatiable quest that led him to travel the world, and in particular to a privileged destination: Norway.
olivier debré
(1920 – 1999)
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.
With the exhibition “Olivier Debré. Un voyage en Norvège”, presented in the galerie blanche, the ccc od has chosen to show a little-known and surprising facet of the painter’s work. Although Debré travelled to Norway on several occasions between 1966 and 1998, his paintings there have until now received very little attention in France. Although the prism of the travelling painter has often been used to approach his painting, it seems that historiography has overlooked this destination, which is nonetheless one of the most recurrent and, plastically, one of the richest.
Although the artist travelled extensively throughout his career, it was in the Loire that he found an unchanging point of anchorage, leaving it only to return again and again. Debré’s presence at ccc od now embodies this eternal return to the Loire. The Loire is the central mental landscape in Debré’s work, the epicentre of this insatiable quest that led him to travel the world, and in particular to a privileged destination: Norway.
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