Magnolias du château de Nantes, 2025

Yann Peron  

From the earliest childhood I liked to color, daub, create with speed, rage and pleasure to leave my traces on all forms of paper, wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, etc. Multicoloring school notebooks, diaries and other course materials, took me out of my solitary daily life to live dreamlike adventures. My summer holidays, I shared them in Pont-Aven between the pleasure of getting bogged down in the mud, swimming in the frozen water of this brackish water river and observing the foliage of the wood of love where Paul Sérusier painted "The Talisman".

Water and spirits of turpentine led me to figurative gestural expression most often watercoloured with diluted tints.

Painting opened my mind and pushed me out of my territory. I had to resist the call of painting to continue my studies of architecture until the moment when I understood that I had to live with it. Visits to museums and exhibitions of my contemporaries influenced me and gave meaning to the gratuitous and powerfully selfish act of painting.

It's a time for yourself. A gesture linked to the gaze that exteriorizes the interior, a spiritual stage.

After studying applied arts at Olivier de Serres, where I spent observing, creating and drawing nudes and objects, I continued my training by taking courses in painting live models at the town hall of Paris. The pleasure of painting overwhelmed me and remains today a sky of youth, an air bubble that allows me to breathe the soul that guides me.

Very little exposed out of fear and probably embarrassment, I experimented with very different techniques and subjects under the framework of the workshop. To expose oneself is to collide with the gaze of the other or to become, for a moment, their collection. It's taking the risk of being hated or loved or worse, left indifferent. Painting is an act of breathing, of concentration which leads to an expressive graphic result which contains clumsiness, finds, mixtures, repentances, the moment of realization which freezes the colors and the subject in time. Figurative, I paint with the body, and revel in the materials spread out like cooking. My senses vibrate, the eye scrutinizes, my feverish hands shake three or four brushes between each hand and the material flows in large strokes beyond the contours. The finality is a fragment of painting nothing else: A piece of expression which now evolves outside and becomes independent. Marked with the seal of the time of its creation, sometimes with several cartridges, the painting becomes a property in its own right in its frame designed and personalized by its author.

I thank the Gaia gallery and Elisabeth Givre for their trust and kindness in exhibiting my works. Painting, exhibiting and selling a canvas is the pursuit of a process of self-knowledge. I have been painting for 35 years, regardless of experience, the works presented come from this journey like a maturation. Today I want to share, simply show my work and taste the pleasure of distributing it.

So, I'm exhibiting this first work by my son Emile, painted during 2020, a special year if ever there was one. It is a watercolor enhanced with oil pastel on arched paper. It is a portrait from a series, where the painting in successive layers reveals other colors in transparency. This painting is important to me because it marks a turning point both in the change of format and technique and in the subject more centered on the body, the face and the hands.