Louis Neyret

Louis Neyret, painter

Born in 1970, this artist is also known by the name of Régis Penet, illustrator and author of comics for more than twenty years.
Since 2018, he has directed part of his activity towards painting.
Quickly, public spaces provided him with the most fertile matter.

"You always have to say what you see: above all, you always have to see what you see, which is more difficult." When Charles Péguy writes this, he is not thinking of an artistic, pictorial or other discipline. Painting, in any case, cannot be reduced to "seeing what you see".
And yet this sentence can be a powerful guide or a framework when one has chosen contemporary figuration as a mode of expression.

Our era surrounds us with straight lines, screens, smooth materials, neon lights, P.V.C, asphalt, acrylic fabrics. We can regret old environments, made of wood, ornate stones, forged metals, dirt roads, oil lamps. We may regret them for aesthetic reasons or for other reasons.
Whether we like it or not, our environment is what it is. Unavoidable. He conditioned our way of being in the world, he and no other. It is the only one which one can have an immediate sensitive experience, any other environment being necessarily mediatized.

Watteau had his own environment and his canvases are punctuated by tricornes and conical silhouettes.
Degas composed works from frock coats and toppers.
Hopper organized his compositions with tarmac roads and railway lines, with the harsh lights of his time.
Degas, again, said, like others after him, that a painting was first and foremost a happy and mysterious assemblage of lines and colors.
Each era offers its own possibilities of assembling lines and colors.

In our time, if we want to punctuate a canvas with bare shoulders, shapely thighs or loose hair, we no longer need to go behind the scenes of the opera or to ask models. The smallest public space naturally offers us an immense variety of bodies, rhythms, shapes.
Provided you see what you see.