Philippe Lepatre

Philippe Lepatre, pseudonym of Philippe Lazar, is a French painter and engraver of Romanian origin, born August 19, 1900 in Bucharest, and died November 14, 1979 in Paris. His works are signed with the monogram “PL”. Philippe Lepatre, who arrived in Paris in 1928, was a student at the Sorbonne before going to take architecture courses in Berlin. During World War II, he took refuge in the south of France where he began to paint. Participating in actions in the Resistance, he obtained French nationality in 1947 and moved to Paris in 1953 to devote himself to painting and engraving. Her work falls within lyrical abstraction and takes on an intellectualized character, her first solo exhibition (Galerie Colette Allendy, 1956) being supported by her text Prolégomènes pour une Philosophie de la Critique. His 1968 exhibition at the Stadler Gallery is likewise associated with his writings, with its presentation of Reality in its Totality - An Essay on a Hierarchy, Principle and Function of the Work of Art. Situating universality in “the highest principle”, he synthesizes his training as an architect and his abstract pictorial vocation by stating as inconceivable “a wall art other than non-figurative, because it alone is integrated quite naturally into the world. modern architecture: non-figurative art is this language of a new universal tradition, of a new world where the sign becomes reality, and reality sign. It is to figurative art what algebra is to mathematics ”.