In September, Corps er soul Gallery presents Jacques Gorde. The Nîmes painter, famous in several cities in France, Germany and the United States, was in the spotlight in 2014 during the summer exhibition in Pont-du-Gard. Died in 2009, he was also entitled to the posthumous recognition of his hometown, since it is one of his works that was chosen for the poster of the Féria de Nîmes in 2010. Inspired by what surrounds him , invested in what he creates, the expressionist artist has put all his soul into his works since he was 17, until his last breath. His style, particularly recognizable, is between a figurative reality and a figurative abstraction. In his work, he gives an important place to color, light, but his style is above all marked by the material. His mania for working and reworking each painting until the last moment, by adding layers of paint on top of each other, through the play of transparencies, creates relief shapes on the canvas. A true guiding thread in his career, Jacques Gorde's silhouettes do not always have their origins. Sometimes African women stand out against a sandy background, sometimes the colors, shapes and lights give free rein to the imagination and interpretation. Characters, not portraits or people, but slender faceless forms, sometimes still, and sometimes animated with an enigmatic movement. These slender silhouettes, captured in the moment, are like a trademark for the artist. An amateur recognizes Jacques Gorde's line, his material, the shape of the characters painted on top of each other, the luminous background… Venice, the city of love, has always inspired many artists, and Jacques Gorde is no exception. He searches there, as in his urban paintings, for traces of man. For four decades, a great colourist, the painter from Nîmes worked on his colors, diversified his palette, daring to add more tones and more contrasts in his works. Since he lived in the South, light has always been of great importance to him. Venice therefore seemed the ideal place for the colourist that he was. Lights and colors, mist and water, reflections and glares… It is in Venice that Jacques Gorde manages to master the natural rendering of light. After having painted Africa, New York, Nîmes and its bullfights, now Italy offers him new landscapes, new reflections. During a trip to New York, it is once again the traces of the man that the artist seeks to represent. As in his works produced in Paris, Lisbon or Barcelona, they take the form of building facades. These are large buildings struck by the lights of the city, which take a more abstract form on his canvases. The plaster, the windows, the neon lights, catch the eye of Jacques Gorde wherever he walks. The exterior of the buildings represents for him the mask that hides the intimate from the view of the street. These are not the natural lights of Italy or the south of France, but the colors of a big city that Nîmois is not used to, and this encounter with verticality brings Gorde's last works closer to abstraction. Today, the image that we keep of Jacques Gorde is that of a simple man, who loved life, his friends and his family and who lived painting in a visceral way. For him a day without painting was a lost day ... But it is also the image of an artist appreciated by a large public. Yes, his painting leaves no one indifferent. These are all aspects of the painter that Corps er soul Gallery wants to celebrate in this exhibition.
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