Simon Cocu

to sum up 60 years of painting in a few lines seems a real challenge to present this artist very justly qualified and recognized as the "painter of the Ardennes" Cantor of this beautiful country, silent as this harsh nature, his landscape painting is full of mists, Snowy mornings, low skies, gnawed rocks, bare trees, the smell of conifers and the Ardennes forest in spring. Demanding colorist, his palette explodes with flamboyant reds when he paints the slag, blacksmiths and founders surprised in their gestures of labor in an apocalypse glow of molten metal. COCU Simon sublimates the reality of his terroir better than anyone. In recent years, his research has gradually taken him to the extreme limit of figuration, stripping of the line, simplification of the palette often reduced to a game of black and white to translate this poor soil, this austere life and ... the forest. always with its secular trees as a recurring, haunting theme. "There are in the same country several real worlds. If one explores the Ardennes, it is not a forest that one discovers but a thousand forests" André Dhôtel, "the country where one never arrives" Editions Pierre Horay, His works are present in many private and public collections, the Musée d'Ardenne in Charleville-Mézières has a dozen paintings by the artists and several hundred of his drawings. He has just illustrated an edition of "Bateau Ivre" Rimbaud