André Raffray

André Raffray Born July 18, 1925 in Nonancourt and died January 6, 2010 in Paris, is a French graphic artist. He first learned drawing by correspondence at the ABC School, then trained with André Rigal, a cartoonist specializing in film graphics, who taught him mastery of cartooning. In 1946 he moved to Paris and joined his workshop. Raffray tried his hand at many techniques: graphite, pencil conté, charcoal, red chalk, Indian ink, but his field of predilection remains colored pencil and gouache. In 1953, André Raffray joined the Animation department of the Gaumont company, he was to become its manager until 1982. He produced the credits but also the prologues of the episodes of the soap opera Les Brigades du Tigre, a great success for French television. between 1970 and 1980. For each episode he produces several gouaches which are then filmed and on which a voice-over lays the foundations for the story that will follow. In the drawings he creates for the series, Raffray makes real historical reconstructions and restores the decorations of the beginning of the century (1900-1920). Each is conceived as a cinematographic scene taking again the format three-quarters of the cinema. Each scene is the result of historical research on the part of the artist who wishes to retrace the daily and real life of those years. André Raffray was a very precise painter, his great sense of detail and history has earned him to be re-studied today as an important contribution. André Raffray was inspired by the works of great painters like Paul Cézanne or Piet Mondrian, and was a great admirer of Marcel Duchamp. Between 1975 and 1976, he produced twelve gouaches entitled La Vie Illustrée by Marcel Duchamp, presented in the inaugural exhibition of the Center Georges Pompidou. These orders were intended to form part of the scenography of the exhibition, designed as backlit paintings or light boxes, they constituted a backdrop around which the exhibition was deployed. In 1977-78 he illustrated the audiovisual encyclopedia of cinema by Claude-Jean Philippe. In 1981, he exhibited again at the Center Pompidou ten paintings from the “Paysages recommencés” series inspired by artists such as John Constable, Gustave Courbet, Piet Mondrian, Georges Seurat, Paul Gaugin and Vincent Van Gogh. He is inspired by these masters, reproduces their works, and goes to the places where the painting is made, in order to recreate the work with more objectivity. He puts himself in the master's place and adopts his point of view but paints them in his own way. He called this series the “recommenced” paintings. He produced these canvases in colored pencil or in oil paint and exhibited them at the Center Pompidou along with the canvases of the masters from which he had obtained the loan. André Raffray with this series of "recommencées" is one of the late appropriationists. For example, it reproduces the Montage Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne (1977-78), Etretat, Soleil couchant by Claude Monet (1980-81) or the Church of Collioure after Henri Matisse. Later he created diptychs of landscapes, in which he reproduced a copy of the work, then he realized his own vision of the site. He hangs these confrontational paintings, such as the Church of Domburg by Piet Mondrian (1985) Notre Dame de Paris, after Henri Matisse (1985) or the cliffs of Pourville by Eugène Delacroix (1984). André Raffray does not always find the landscape painted by the masters, which he copies in the same state as that of the work, they have sometimes been transformed. These frustrations led him to create torn landscapes: “Sometimes, in my research, I was frustrated at not being able to use certain famous sites, part of which had unfortunately disappeared. This was the case, in particular, for the views of Georges Seurat in Port-en-Bessin. The idea occurred to me to “reconstitute” them, by combining colored pencils and photos. I drew the missing part from the painting and attached to it, tearing it up on demand, a photo of the still existing part, the one Seurat had known. The painter's extreme fidelity to his subject allowed the two elements to fit exactly. ". André Raffray has also reproduced self-portraits of masters, to do so he looked in bookstores and libraries for a photograph of the self-portrait, or an image showing the posture of the artist at the same age. His method and his creative process are often the same: he takes a photograph of the painting he wants to make, after having selected his slides, he projects them on a canvas. Thanks to this projection, he defines the framing, notes the details of the composition but also the variations of tones and the density of tints. He then realizes his canvas most often with colored pencils in an almost photographic representation giving an illusion of reality. In 2005, a retrospective exhibition was devoted to him at the Museum of Fine Arts in the city of Rouen entitled “André Raffray or painting recommenced”. In 2012, the Semiose gallery produced an exhibition of drawings that André Raffray made for Les bridages du Tigre.