La promise, Circa 2010

Jean-Yves Boislève  

After practicing painting and lithography, which he discovered in the workshop run by Jacques Durand-Henriot at the Regional School of Fine Arts in Rennes, Jean-Yves BOISLÈVE published copper engravings and screen prints before devoting himself to almost exclusively to saving size engraving.

It was during a visit to an exhibition on textiles that he was amazed by the wooden blocks used for printing and by their subtle printing effects.

This will be his source of inspiration for years, especially as stays in West Africa allowed him to observe these fabrics and those draped with them more closely. Doesn't the imprecision of color identification simply lead to a poetry of form, the overlapping of tones to a kaleidoscopic facet or to the mixing of spaces. So many sources of inspiration for an artist.

He made his second decisive encounter during the exhibition ''Impressions Bretonnes'' wood engraving in Brittany presented at the Musée Départemental Breton in Quimper. He will then engrave Breton landscapes, using lost plates, a technique which requires a lot of analysis and creativity. These boards resonate as a tribute to artists from all backgrounds who wanted to make Brittany a land of modernity.

Jean-Yves Boislève lives and works near Lorient.