Nus, 1990

Hastaire  

His real name, Claude Hilaire was raised in a family of artists. Her father and mother are painters, her only uncle is a musician. His father, Camille Hilaire will reach a reputation which will survive his death in June 2004. After a period of estrangement, although practicing very different approaches to painting, from the 80s, they will establish a very close emotional relationship which will last until Camille's death.

Hastaire begins to be recognized at the end of the 70s. His painted work is exhibited in various spaces in Europe, USA, Canada, Japan, Korea: Aaron Gallery, (1976, Washington DC), Palais de Tokyo, Femis (Paris), Center for Plastic Arts, Paris (1991), Musée Goya, (1990, Castres), Musée Rimbaud / Musée de l'Ardenne, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Dunkirk, Paris / Seoul, France / Japan, La Galerie (1990, Oslo ), L'Embarcadère (2008, Montceau), Artcurial, (2004, Paris). Shanghai, retrospective, (French Pavilion 2010).

Hastaire's independence, his mistrust of state or private institutions, his immoderate taste for travel took him away from the search for a comfortable position within the usual world of painting quite quickly. Little inclined to modanities, no more eager to prosper thanks to a party, any body and, although his work was recognized early on by Museums, Contemporary Art Centers and Quality Galleries, he made the bet of a risky choice: that of being alone, alone in the particular path of his pictorial work.

This freedom wanted, claimed, with the dangers it implies, is a reflection of the freedoms taken by the artist throughout his career. Like the traces, the clear marks left by his works, in their cutouts, Hastaire is a real nomad. To join a current or against the current is foreign to him. He lets himself slide towards his desires for the unknown in order to constantly discover. Of course, he left at a certain point in the history of painting, but he used it as a springboard in order to bounce back on his particular world. And this world will be made of rebounds. There would be in this artist a propensity to exhaust his themes to a point of saturation - pictorial, intellectual - which would leave him little more than the choice to risk himself again to something else, until the latter is exhausted and so immediately ... (Edith Charlton)

As Stéphane Hessel wrote in his preface to the catalog of the Hastaire exhibition at the Town Hall in Trouville in 2008: "... I was immediately sensitive to the work of this never-weary man. , searching with the scalpel of its profuse culture all the faces and all the facets of this constantly renewed practice that is the desire to paint.

It is up to us first of all to look at this refined work, to enter it as in a space as clear as it is secret, as welcoming as it is confusing, a space that it is not a question of conquering but of authorizing to conquer you.

And then it is advisable to discover his saying, to read the texts where he was able to express with anger sometimes, with frankness and subtlety always what must be the relationship between the creator of art and his two creatures: the work and its spectator. ... ".

Hastaire died on February 17, 2020 in Trouville.