Exposition - Guy Le Meaux

GUY LE MEAUX

Born in Hennebont, near Lorient (Morbihan) in 1947, Guy Le Meaux comes from a world on the edge of the ocean, inhabited by the monuments of Prehistory. The titles of his works - which the artist sometimes first writes in Breton - speak of the first origins of his painting, thus Maen-Sonn, pierre dressée, Stèle. Guy Le Meaux studied at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Lorient (in Gérard Gautron's studio) at the end of the 1960s: < At eighteen I was drawn to painting >. From 1972 to 1975, he lived at the Casa de Velazquez in Madrid. The Castilian highlands, the polychrome sculpture of Spain's Golden Age, the masterpieces of the Prado Museum, notably the paintings of Ribera and Zurbaran, and the great equestrian portraits of Velazquez, provided a second source for his vocation as a painter.From 1975 to 1977, Guy Le Meaux was a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome, but on his return from Rome, he settled alone in Saint-Thomas-de-Conac (1977-1981): his visits to the churches of Saintonge (architecture and sculpture) were superimposed on his knowledge of Romanesque art, which he had admired in Tuscany and Puglia. Perhaps the light of the Gironde estuary and riverbanks reminded him of the rias of southern Brittany, the Laïta and Blavet estuaries...

Guy Le Meaux's work takes on the demands of painting: inner depth, depth in history, a broad and highly singular vision of modernity and contemporaries, a wide range of themes and genres: landscape, portraiture, architecture, but also maps and letters. The artist approaches this < thematic > variety with the full range of means and media available to the art of painting, drawing, cutting, assembling and gluing ... oil paint on canvas or wood, oil on paper, gouache, watercolor, pastel, graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, oil pastel, wax pastel, ink...