Patrick Devreux

For many years, professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, member of the steering committee of the Salon de Mai, he first devoted himself to engraving. Since the 1980s he has collaborated with the journal Passages d'Encre.

Patrick Devreux's closed world is that of his interiors, whose poetry he transmits in the mirror of a transposed reality. The subject fixes timeless forms without losing its truth; the canvas becomes the place of the infinite where any hint of illusion is consumed. The desire to refrain from any recourse to realism, leads the artist to strip his themes, limited to interiors and the nude.

The outlines fade to favor emergence in a more expansive, generous and restrained way in the way Patrick Devreux suggests the compact confinement of things in suspended time.

The volumes hesitate between the affirmation of their envelope and their dissolution in the transparent light which gives the whole composition an immobile truth.

Patrick Devreux questions the complementarity inside and out. It is a question here of seeing and not of looking. Seeing in the sense where the gaze ceases to act, to construct, or it lets itself be penetrated and, as it were, surprised by the things arranged there.

We are far from the noise. No distractions. Something then appears that we do not usually see from a place, by dint of being in it, of taking care of it.

(extract from Lydia Harambourg and Nicole Malinconi)