Oil painting on canvas by Jean Batail, Lyon, thatched cottage in the Brière marshes, Vendée

Framed oil on canvas, likely from the 1970s-1980s, signed Batail for Jean Batail (1930-2021).

This painting is quite unique in its subject matter: a thatched cottage, perhaps in the Brière region, but with that characteristically unsettling and disturbing style.

It comes from an estate sale in the Saint Gilles Croix de Vie area of the Vendée department.
The thick impasto allows the painting to possess a beautiful luminosity.

Canvas dimensions: 33.5 cm x 24.5 cm.

Delivery available via Chronopost for:
France €20
Europe €35
Other countries €50
*BORN IN 1930 IN LYON (FRANCE) - DIED IN 2021 IN SAINTE-FOY-LÈS-LYON
Jean Batail's works were first exhibited in 1949 at the Salon d'Automne in Lyon. The artist subsequently participated in various group exhibitions: Galerie L’Œil Écoute, Lyon (1963); Paris Biennale (1965); Peintres de Lyon, Maison de la Culture de Grenoble (1969); Peinture Lyonnaise du XIXe à nos jours, Maison du Peuple, Vénissieux (1971); La Réalité en question, ELAC, Lyon (1976), etc. Jean Batail's first solo exhibition took place in 1957 at the Galerie Bellecour in Lyon. From 1972 onwards, his work was regularly exhibited at the Galerie Le Lutrin in Lyon.
Jean Batail's self-taught artistic practice lies somewhere between painting and photography. He initially focused on photography, capturing places and people from his everyday surroundings. Conceived as preparatory studies, these black and white photographs were then reinterpreted through painting, notably by enlarging details and using monochrome coloring. Defined more by their luminosity than their colors, Batail's canvases are often monochromatic: gradations of yellow ochre, black and white, and blue-gray. While hyperrealistic before his time in his creative process, Jean Batail did not seek a faithful reproduction of the original image, nor the unsettling illusionism of a simulated reality. If Jean Batail's paintings are unsettling, it is more because of their strange atmosphere, their unreal light, and the experience of a palpable emotion. The artist is primarily interested in revealing detail through close-ups and montage, and in the poetic possibilities of combining these two practices.

In this hybrid figurative practice, Batail manages to negate any temporal dimension. Poised between tradition and modernity, depicting places and figures that have become anonymous, even universal, the canvases are also untitled.
The accentuation of light contrasts, the capturing of pensive poses, and the placement of human beings within a mineral landscape or a setting of ruins create a style that is both dramatic and romantic. Dark forms, intense skies, and the marbling of textures lend Jean Batail's works a kinship with old postcards or daguerreotypes, whose motifs seem to fade with time.
From the 1980s onward, Jean Batail's works became more colorful or lighter, populated by groups of children and light, dancing figures. Always imbued with a gentle melancholy, they seem to be moving ever closer to their photographic foundation: the writing of light.

Source: Villeurbanne Institute of Contemporary Art.

Ref: CFG45JU68Y