Artist : Jean-Louis SIMONIN (1934-2022)
Title : Face 1, 1999
Medium : Gouache on thin paper
Type of work : Original painting signed by the artist and dated lower right
Dimensions : 29 cm x 21 cm
Condition : Good
Provenance : Workshop of the painter, the invoice engages the responsibility of the gallery as to the authenticity of the work.
Expert's comments : Jean-Louis SIMONIN's drawing is expressive and deliberately simplifying. Like the expressionists, he shamelessly paints a derisory, sometimes pathetic humanity, but he often does so with humor. His characters often rub shoulders with animals, spirits, demons or gods. They are propelled into a situation where everything can switch: either towards the deepest humanity or towards this animality present in each of us. Jean-Louis SIMONIN is therefore always on the borderline between the speakable and the inexpressible which haunts men. It then allows us to glimpse the unconscious, the one that precedes all reason, all control. His subjects do not slip under the gaze, they stop him and question us about our own duality. The artist is also always at the limit of the visible and the invisible. Jean-Louis SIMONIN obviously, like his friend the painter Alain-Michel BOUCHER, is influenced by the artists of the Cobra movement: CORNEILLE, Pierre ALECHENSKY, Jean Michel ATLAN, Asger JORN and Karel APPEL. It brings to life this unruly and mocking inner child, endowed with an overflowing energy that our rationalistic civilization has buried deep within us.
Artist's biography : Born in 1934 Jean-Louis Simonin on the advice of his wife who noticed his talent enrolled in Robert Savary's course, professor at the Beaux-arts in Rouen in the 1970s. The artist will test all the techniques, oil, gouache, engraving but also collage. Quickly, he found his style, which he himself called expressionist. His subjects are therefore very often characters who question the viewer about his own dualities. He also paints in a more figurative style the landscapes he likes such as Normandy but also the Var having a workshop in the south of La Garde-Freinet near Saint-Tropez.
This description was developed by us following our expertise and the various reference books on the artist in our possession, any copying is therefore prohibited.