Edouard Trémeau

Born in Theillay in 1936, Édouard Trémeau has been working in the Lille region since 1963. He was trained at the School of Applied Arts from 1952 to 1956, then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1956-1957 and at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan from 1957 to 1961.

Close to Narrative Figuration and the Salon de la Jeune Peinture at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s - he was vice-president of the salon in 1983 - he took part in various collectives that denounced forms of political oppression and social and economic inequalities.

In 1981, during an exhibition at the Pierre Lescot Gallery in Paris, the painter claimed to have left his studio to look outside. He then painted scenes from the daily life of the "early Mitterrand years", showing man's anguish in the face of the society of control, in the face of the silent violence that threatens bodies, as in Façades n°5 (Tout en bon ordre), July-August 1980, acquired by the L.A.M. Musée d'Art Moderne, d'Art Contemporain et d'Art Brut - Lille Métropole in Villeneuve-d'Ascq in 1983.

Then the withdrawal to the studio, nourished by the traces of many travels, follows the collective projects which resist badly to the rise of the economic and financial liberalism.

His work was then divided into major themes - solitude, confinement, ruin - opening with series: hostages (1982-86), Berlin (1987-89), Zoolitude (1998-2002), Rome (1991-94), Rome outside the walls (1994-97), and numerous self-portraits that marked the years of creation up to the series of Gisants "L'évidence" ("The Evidence") produced from 2006 to 2008. The painter's body undergoes a remarkable "inventory of fixtures", a remarkable pretext for questioning once again its relationship to the history of art, and recalling "Andrea Mantegna, Philippe de Champaigne, the two anatomy lessons of Rembrandt, Hans Holbein".