Le cube, 2000

Patrick Lanneau  

Patrick Lanneau was from 1971 to 1973 a student at the School of Fine Arts in Tours then, from 1974 to 1977, at the School of Decorative Arts in Nice

In 1979, along with Denis Castellas, Gérald Thupinier, Claude Goiran, Jean Borsotto, Jacques Chaumard and Sylvette Maurin, he was part of the artists' collective which founded, on rue Saint-Vincent in Nice, the group called "L'Atelier" to which they went. take an interest in the gallery owners Anne and Jean-Pierre Roger, then Hélène Jourdan-Gassin. In 1985, he moved to Frigos, 91 quai de la Gare in the 13th arrondissement of Paris to live there for fifteen years. His stays in Africa (in Senegal, with a residency supported by the French Association for Artistic Action, then in Egypt) initiated the recurring presence in his works of porticoes, palm trees, firs, pyramids, clouds, rocks and barriers.

If Jean-Marc Réol sees in Patrick Lanneau the representative of "the return to a neo-expressionist figuration in the movement of Free Figuration of the early 1980s" 2, Nadine Labédade observes that "her first paintings (1979-1985) highlight scene of isolated bodies or in pairs in allusive landscapes. The stridence of colors, the schematization of forms and the work of the pictorial material evoke a dreamlike universe in weightlessness. Later, Lanneau devoted himself exclusively to the landscape which became more and more evasive. The practice of drawing, on paper or digital, that of video (Départ, The root of the branches), complete this research on the landscape with its atmospheres and its subtle variations "3.

From 1983 on, Gérard Xuriguera placed Patrick Lanneau, notably with Pierre Buraglio, Dominique Thiolat, Lionel Godart, Tony Soulié, Marcel Alocco, Christian Sorg, Christian Bonnefoi, Pierrette Bloch, Denis Castellas, Jean Mazeaufroid, Jean-Paul Huftier and Laura Lamiel, among the emerging artists who are part of the renewal of abstract art by obeying "to impulses and knowledge that are no longer symbolic, since they intend to dismantle the mechanisms of painting, where the ideology may no longer interfere, where the winding paths of theory may no longer be so restrictive, but all are aware of belonging to a generation which had the merit of asking questions necessary and essential to the 'object of their representation' 4.

Back in the Nice region in 2000, Patrick Lanneau taught at the municipal school of plastic arts (villa Thiole) in Nice until 2016.