by Ralph Resch

Ralph Resch is a French painter born in 1965 in Mulhouse. Self-taught, it was in 1983 that he started practicing painting, inspired by his life of night owl, in jazz clubs and cafes. In 1985 he became a textile designer at Texunion and attended evening classes at the School of Fine Arts of Mulhouse. In 1992 he joined the textile designer studio Paul Hargittai (Hungarian painter and designer) at Rue de la Paix, in Paris. In 1994, influenced by his numerous trips to Africa his painting turned towards abstraction and warm colors. At the same time, he started working on the masks of the Fang ethnic group, and on protraits of Africans. In 1995 he opened his own workshop at Quai de la gare in Paris. He painted in incresingly large formats and started using a mixed technique (gouache-oil-ink-chalk) made of colors and of large flat areas where the figurative is structured in a way that it gives freedom to the materials's effects (sand, glue, clay). In the 2000s, he was invited by the French Cultural Center in Jordan, and exhibited his paintings at the "Royal Gallery of Jordan". He participared in the open doors of the Atelier d'Artistes in Montreuil, and exhibits his work in the South of France, Luxembourg, and regularly in Paris.