Le merle, 2019

Yves Lévêque  

Yves Lévêque was born in 1937 to a Quebec mother and a Limousin father. In 1967, very young, he left Paris and moved to the countryside, first in Yvelines, then in Beauce and finally in Thimerais.

It is in this setting, in the heart of nature, that Yves Lévêque has lived for over thirty years, a hard worker outside of fashions.

On very large or small formats, loaded with material or all in delicacy, Yves Lévêque paints the plain, the cultural universe. Its vocabulary revolutionizes the very idea of a campaign. Far from any abstraction, he reformulates everything: the earth, the tractor, the walker in the paths, etc.

As Michel Tournier wrote about Yves Lévêque's painting: “The plain is secretly opulent, the bare and empty plain is full of invisible riches. This apparently ungrateful land conceals latent energies which are concentrated in golden harvests (….). There is a storm in this land where layers of accumulated energy sleep (…). Slow explosion, silent explosion ... ”.

Galerie Guillaume exhibited Yves Lévêque in 2006 “terre neuves”, in 2007 “A fleur de terre” on the occasion of the release of his monograph with a text by Germain Viatte and in 2009 “Lepus”, as well as Imago (2011 ), The hollow tree (Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp, 2012), Recent paintings (with Thierry des Ouches, 2014), Yveline (2017) and The birds perfume the woods (2020).