Exposition de photos : Cyr Boitard

Lives and works between Tours and Richelieu.

Cyr Boitard attended the Louvre as a child, where he immersed himself in the masters, drawing and copying, which helped refine his style. At the age of fifteen, he entered the Académie Charpentier, then the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (formerly the École royale gratuite de dessin). During these years of experimentation, he and his fellow students formed a collective around plastic interventions: while some were painters, others were graphic artists, filmmakers, photographers and musicians. Their main influences are Pop art, the Surrealists, punk rock, comic books, German expressionist cinema and Russian futurism of the 1930s?

Art professions

Having practiced painting since his youth, Cyr devoted several years to fulfilling commissions from Ateliers Georges Boitard - his father's studio - whether for fine ceramics, murals or textiles. Subsequently, he took on a variety of decorating commissions (for renowned hotels, restaurants, department stores, chapels, etc.). Supported since childhood in his pictorial work by Françoise and Gérard Klein, he emigrated to Haute-Loire at the start of the new millennium, where they offered him a studio and commissioned him to paint canvases and frescoes on a recurring basis.

These peregrinations led him to Richelieu in Touraine, where they commissioned him to paint frescoes in a 17th-century mansion. Subsequently, he and chef Myriam Montagner set up Le Fossé Saint Ange, a delightful restaurant brimming with pictorial and culinary curiosities at the gateway to the Cardinal's city.

Engraving & Painting

Since the 90s, Cyr has been practicing printmaking, in particular monotype and drypoint. In 2010, to complement his pictorial work, he resumed his experiments in printmaking and, with Hermance des Robert, set up the Jambe de Bois workshop on the premises of La Teinturerie, a place of richlais cultural experimentation. Their work is exhibited annually in contemporary printmaking galleries and salons. Through the intermediary of Peter Tagiuri, an architect and professor emeritus at RISD (Rhode Island University of Design, one of the leading art institutes in the United States) with a love of Touraine, they are entrusted each year with internships and master-classes in which they teach the art of printmaking to American and Korean students.