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It was during his 1959 exhibition at the
Phillips Gallery in Washington that Olivier
Debré made the salutary acquaintance of Mark
Rothko, Jules Olitski and Franz Kline, and became convinced that his
convinced himself that his pictorial approach
the telluric figure of Nicolas de Staël.
de Staël. Figures", colored forms,
fluid, frank, rapid, uncluttered forms
replace the mass,
trowel and knife, and their subtle
their subtle poetics to reach the magical
world of spirituality.
For Olivier Debré, the painting "Figure rouge
from 1962 is a work of passage, CAPITAL,
from which all his future work would emerge. Painting
eloquent color, deliberately saturated
saturated, akin to Beethoven's symphonies
Beethoven's symphonies, where all is balance and sensitivity,
where the love of spaces where one feels
feeling of solitude. Olivier Debré's taste for
color red - known as the color of happiness
later found its way into his designs for the
curtain of the Hong Kong Opera House, the stage and
and iron curtain at the Comédie Française and
some of his major works.
In the painting "Figure rouge", the shapes created
are sources of inner light,
that transcend pure reason and reach out
the world of intangible feelings. This
world, derived from reality, does not represent reality
but signifies it. Images of things snatched from time
from time through pictorial transposition
forces us to consider the world not from the relative
from the relative point of view of our perception
but as an analysis of that very perception
and the masterly gesture that expresses it.
The work of art "works the world" because it
escapes the simple transposition of reality
and removes the optical image from the passage
of time.
Olivier Debré is one of the few artists, perhaps the only one
perhaps even the only one, who can detach himself
to unite Soul and Art. We
will find these qualities facilitating
progress and the slow, barely visible rise
of constant, uninterrupted spiritual thought
and uninterrupted, where everything belongs without
to the realm of pure plasticity, so that the
so that the eternal walk can begin.
begin.
Philippe Le Burgue
Art critic, Honorary Expert to the Court
d'Appel de Paris
