La lettre, 1990

Henri Aprin  

"Henri Aprin, the name of a much too little-known artist who deserves to be brought to light as his work is impressive, moving and monumental in its diversity and visionary approach. A poster artist and illustrator by trade, a former student of the Beaux-Arts d'Avignon, a talented draftsman, he was drawn to the world of Art from a very young age. Since his retirement, he has devoted himself entirely to his painting, as an assumed solitary man and without any concern for recognition.

Through his various inspirations, he remains a committed artist because he is deeply human and touched by the horrors of existence, war, resistance, torture, prison, injustice, suffering and death...

His connection with poetry and his attachment to certain poetic figures such as Éluard, Apollinaire, Aragon and Garcia Lorca, his tributes to these great figures, animate a large part of his work and are poignantly true, full of messages and revealing of his spiritual and humanitarian commitment to a world of peace, love and freedom.

The homage paid to Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish playwright, martyr of love and war, characterized by his red prints on his cardboards, like the blood that flows in the arena and freezes in death, and which he violently projects onto his support, hits us and questions us about human destiny. This beloved poet who always showed true tenderness for the oppressed and the rejected remains an endearing figure for the painter who finds himself around this benevolence for others, this humanity that emerges from his work and his writings. This sensitive and calligraphic writing that very often insinuates itself into his works and finalizes their composition, testifies to this profound sharing with the world of poetry.

The surrealist poet Éluard moves him with his poetry where lyricism, freedom, the unexpected and the dramatic emerge. With his brushes and the relevance of an abstract composition, he transcribes for us the vision of a man who looks at human pain and despair, but also at hope and love.

His attachment to Jean Ferrat, one of Aragon's most popular interpreters, who sings to us of his love for Elsa, becomes a familiar figure full of tenderness. The singer's portrait stands in the middle of his studio as the spokesperson for the great poet that was Aragon.

The beautiful Elsa with her enigmatic eyes appears in a composition of warm tones with Aragon's words resonating and sparkling around this extremely gentle portrait.

Poetry and painting are intimately linked in Aprin's artistic creations, as if painting could not exist without words and words without painting.

His landscapes, mostly imaginary or memorial, memories of hasty wanderings in the wild, are perfectly balanced with stormy skies of exceptional beauty. They give his rocky architecture a soft and internal light, which radiates in a universe where black gives power to shadows and colorful contrasts. His palette made of dark tones is extremely fine and beautifully sober where his warm tones and blue-grays harmonize admirably.

The committed artist who takes sides in the resistance against Nazism, wants to bear witness to the violence of this world and looks at the drama of the Spanish Civil War and this flight towards freedom where he exhumes the fate of the vanquished, the exiles, even internal exile, suffering stigmatized on painful faces that he depicts for us in a palette of moving darkness. Then his gaze turns to the deportees from the concentration camps or even the murdered resistance fighter, always with passages of writing from committed poets to bear witness...

Close to the miserabilist painting of Francis Gruber or Bernard Buffet, engaged in the social painting movement, he describes suffering humanity with a visionary and symbolic painting and intensely explores the themes of anguish, solitude and the human condition. In this way, he is an expressionist painter who denounces and sometimes offends our sensibilities.

His painting sometimes becomes material, sculptural, rough, with the use of various materials recovered haphazardly, to shape and highlight certain portraits like that of Van Gogh, sublime in its purity and its truth or for his homage to Rodin or even to reveal to us the painful faces of the exiles.

Victor Hugo spoke of mysterious threads that connect beings even beyond their earthly existence. I think that Henri Aprin is connected to these souls, deceased painters or poets to whom he pays homage with his brushes and his materials but also with his writing. He is, too, a poet at heart who has the power of words and who moves us deeply with the simplicity of his prose and his poetry. He writes as much as he paints, a pile of abandoned works, illustrations from books and magazines, autobiographical stories, testimonies, travel journals, tributes to loved ones like his grandmother, all gathered in a corner of his studio, without any concern for possible publication. The purpose of all this matters little to him, detached from any commercial goal, the artist who paints and writes as he breathes, in a visceral way, with religiosity one could say, has no other concern than that of expressing himself instinctively, according to his inspirations. Freed from the cerebral and the stakes of success and recognition, he remains a free, pure, sincere and authentic man, one of those artists who are rare these days.

Henri Aprin created and offered to the church of Chateaurenard a crucified Christ, an admirable religious figure that bears witness to the suffering in the world, and which he considers to be the summit of his art and the work that will have marked his life, in front of which he humbly tells us, "with age I have lost many of my certainties and I look at this Christ with great tenderness." This sentence gives us a glimpse of a man of heart, benevolence and humility, in addition to his talent and his genius as a painter and creator.

He sometimes visits the graves of artists who have moved him, painters, sculptors or poets, and picks a piece of ivy or collects a few dead leaves or some pebbles or shells, near the tombstone. He thus returns home preciously keeping these relics, a souvenir of a moment of meditation and thoughts for those who have left this world... but who remain immortal for him and above all a beautiful source of inspiration."

Monique Laidi