GERARD EPPELE BORN IN 1929

GOUACHE.67X51CM PORTANT LE NUMBER 915 (année 78)....ET TITLED "L'INNOCENT". SOLID OAK FRAME.

Painter-sculptor Gérard Eppelé was born in Cherbourg in 1929. He spent ten years of his childhood in Morocco. Returning to France in 1942, he began his studies at a technical college, then entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse for two brief stays (1946 and 1948). He immediately embarked on a personal pictorial quest. After two years at the Ecole Nationale de Tapisseries d'Aubusson, he became a decorative painter for the cinema - with Max Bouy - working for directors such as Renoir, Autan-Lara and Bunuel. For health reasons, he was forced to stay in a sanatorium for several years, where he began to produce numerous drawings, including a suite of portraits of his fellow patients. There he met André Bazin, with whom he helped set up a film club. Gérard Eppelé settled in south-east France in 1959.
That same year (1959), he made a decisive encounter with Jean Dubuffet; he became his assistant for a time, and Dubuffet allowed him to hold his first exhibition at the Galerie Chave in Vence ("Dessins du moment, Petit Bal de Têtes"). Since then, Gérard Eppelé has continued to paint, draw and sculpt, and his work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad (Germany, Egypt, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Italy, England, Norway and Sweden, USA, Kenya, etc.). Galerie Chave organized no fewer than eight exhibitions of the artist's work between 1959 and 2000. In 2006, a magnificent exhibition of his work ("La pratique de la mélancolie") was organized by the Villa Tamaris in La Seyne/Mer.
In addition to his work as a painter and sculptor, and as a teacher until 1992 (Villa Arson, Nice), the artist took an interest in the world of printmaking (engravings and lithographs) and, perhaps even more profoundly, in the world of illustrated books, happily accompanying his poet and writer friends (André Verdet, Tita Reut, Claude Haza, Marie-Agnés Courouble and many others).
This painter continues to move us with the consistency of his work, an unwavering sense of direction and an unwavering commitment to fashions. The artist likes to remind us that to reach color, you have to go through black and white. The torment of bodies and minds. Gérard Eppelé has built up an original body of work; his pictorial discourse is an experience of consciousness and of the way his very personal vision looks at the world. For Gérard Eppelé, the act of painting becomes a lucidity of man through the pain he feels.
Gérard Eppelé, who lived for many years in Tourettes/Loup (Alpes-Maritimes), now lives in Arles.

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