Traits One, 2019

Richard Saint-Amans  

Richard Saint-Amans is a French artist born in 1949 in Béziers. he lives and works near Versailles.

Although he has attended art courses in prestigious schools, Richard Saint-Amans defines himself as an autodidact. His artistic debut as a teenager took him to photography, which he turned aside to create hybrid prints, the preconceptions of which are already being worked on.

Arrive painting. His taste for American hyperrealism, Flemish primitives, his background as a photographer naturally takes him to a hyperrealist figuration. He then works on the issue of transparency and glazing in a demanding technical exploration.

He ends up feeling cramped in this approach and the concomitant discovery of Japan confirms the abandonment of this path. By freeing himself from the constraints of the technique, he refocuses himself on the line, concentrating on gestures in a quasi-calligraphic approach.

Inspired by Hans Hartung, he is interested in signs, traces and other bits of memory left on the walls.

Mixing of supports and hybridization still between text and pictorial work. Thus, most of the numbers he walked away the sandstone of his inner paths, he comes to superimpose signs, substrates of an almost forgotten writing, producing abstract compositions, stripping, purifying his line for ever closer of the essence of the gesture, calligraphing the painting in a way.