Presentation
Philippe Croq, born in 1961 in Douarnenez started painting in 1991, after having worked in the aerospace industry. He lives and works in Marseille.
“After a serious illness, Philippe Croq gave up his career in the aerospace industry and dedicated his time to painting. At first it came from the necessity to cure his anguish and his trauma, and then his perspective started to widen, and he started to represent reality, at first his own memory and then his paintings gained a collective dimension.
He is a self-taught artist, but his work is inspired by rich cultural references that go, without any effort, from Caravaggio to Joy Division, from Manet to Coppola, but also Bacon, J. P.Witkin, Twombly ...
His childhood memories – photographs, objects, words -, but also the news, celebrities, songs, elements of the time and fashion, appear recurrently in his paintings. They are “expressed through painting”, they become shapes that produce other shapes. In his large format paintings, that the eye and the body can embrace in a 1:1 scale, images are born intuitively, almost automatically, as the painter tries to “let his hand work faster than his brain”. In the images he creates the form meets the word and the figure meets the phrase.
There is almost always ambiguity in the way these elements get together. The shapes are intentionally unclear, not perfect and the meanings are open, ambivalent, suggesting the state of the world as the artist perceives it: confuse, in movement, impenetrable.”
- C. Croq
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“After a serious illness, Philippe Croq gave up his career in the aerospace industry and dedicated his time to painting. At first it came from the necessity to cure his anguish and his trauma, and then his perspective started to widen, and he started to represent reality, at first his own memory and then his paintings gained a collective dimension.
He is a self-taught artist, but his work is inspired by rich cultural references that go, without any effort, from Caravaggio to Joy Division, from Manet to Coppola, but also Bacon, J. P.Witkin, Twombly ...
His childhood memories – photographs, objects, words -, but also the news, celebrities, songs, elements of the time and fashion, appear recurrently in his paintings. They are “expressed through painting”, they become shapes that produce other shapes. In his large format paintings, that the eye and the body can embrace in a 1:1 scale, images are born intuitively, almost automatically, as the painter tries to “let his hand work faster than his brain”. In the images he creates the form meets the word and the figure meets the phrase.
There is almost always ambiguity in the way these elements get together. The shapes are intentionally unclear, not perfect and the meanings are open, ambivalent, suggesting the state of the world as the artist perceives it: confuse, in movement, impenetrable.”
- C. Croq
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When was Philippe Croq born?
The year of birth of the artist is: 1961