Esther Thierry

Thierry Esther was born on Reunion Island - an island of miscegenation par excellence ... Thierry Esther was born on Reunion Island - an island of miscegenation par excellence, where over the centuries blood and values of European settlers, deported African slaves, working poor Indians and exiles from the Middle Empire. The first years of his life were therefore influenced by the cultural masala (mixture) of Bourbon Island, inexorably shaped by its island setting. At the young age of 8, he had to leave and follow his mother to Paris, unaware that a few years later, his life as a young boy and then as a young Parisian would guide the brushes he would one day hold in his hand. As a teenager, Thierry armed himself with drawing and painting instruments, and he reproduced his naive and rebellious post-adolescent thought on paper and canvas. He then painted very diverse canvases for which he adopted different techniques as if to explore all the possibilities of his art. At the same time, he spent a year at the National Center for Graphic Arts where he mainly practiced drawing, and was introduced to computer-assisted graphics techniques. The themes he tackles during this period of his life are varied; he expresses his interest in his origins in Gandhi's India; also expresses his admiration for the great masters (as in Les reeds by Van Gogh); and he lets himself go to utter a few cries (as is the case in the canvas L'Incompris). He also discovers Pédalan and Cesare Pavese which inspire him some paintings like Tear. After a year of absence abroad, he will come back with an ever more consuming appetite for art as a whole. He follows an Arabic calligraphy course at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts. At that time, he painted less but got involved in dance, theater, singing, cinema, until a serious accident that plunged him into a coma and after which his life would take yet another turn. Curious and eternally dissatisfied, he was no longer satisfied with his short expeditions abroad. He decides to emigrate to the Canary Islands, where he will spend 3 years. A few paintings will be born from this temporary exile (mainly on the theme of the sea and the coast), but he will abandon them all on the spot to return to Paris in 2005 and create his own communication agency. Only, he no longer finds himself in the still too occasional painter that he sees every morning in the mirror. He needs more. It is his body and his soul that claim it. So in 2007, he cleaned up his life for the nth time, and resumed painting with a ferocious appetite. Since then, he has enthusiastically fed us his paintings, as if they were wines that he had left to mature in barrels for a long time and that he could not help but share. From 2010, Thierry Esther developed his technique. It maintains the use of spatulas and integrates that of scrapers from 1 to 2 meters. He gradually abandoned acrylic in favor of oil which he highlighted using old techniques: mixtures of pigments, linseed oil, turpentine. He tackles larger formats, exceeding 2 meters, he deepens his technique. To feed his curiosity and develop his art, he attends numerous conferences, spends his days in galleries and museums. He is particularly fond of the Palais de Tokyo, which is for him a research laboratory. He discovers new artists, studies their methods, observes their choices in terms of color associations. He was entrusted with the management of an art gallery in Paris for 3 years, a turning point that will lead him to make rich encounters that will change his outlook on painting, on today's artists, on what represents art in the 21st century. He will leave the gallery in 2013 to devote himself fully to his new series “Painting, music and dust, inspired by major operas performed by Maria Callas”, a collection made up of around sixty works (paintings, sculptures, drawings, etc.).