Hommage à Soulages, 2025

Bruno Cantais  

Bruno Cantais, professional painter currently living in the Lyon region, is registered and contributes to the Maison des Artistes. Born on March 13, 1966 in Le Havre, he began his artistic journey through the door of the conservatory in Paris. From participation in plays by Robert Hossein to filming for TV films and films, he will subsequently have to go behind the camera, on the radio, then to write short stories and a novel. But one fine day, a quieter world opens up to him like a deliverance, an evidence: painting. Bulimic and spontaneous creator, Bruno Cantais explores several techniques, ranging from abstract expressionism à la Rauschenberg, to projections of matter à la Georges Mathieu, to the Pop Art collage or to the expressionism of Karel Appel, which surveys the boundaries between abstract gesture and figurative representation. But his signature still remains this physical painting, this material worked on the body, testimony of the artist's intimate monologue. He searches the surface of the impasted canvas, digging furrows which seem to open up paths or sometimes get lost in the mists of color. His inspiration is order and disorder, feeling and feeling, shadow and light, emptiness and fullness. Touching the moment more than the moment, the invisible, the link between everything and nothing. "The canvas, evocative of my unconscious, invites you to share, to capture the present moment, the elusive, the reflection. I aspire to give only the essential: emotion."