GERARD EPPELE BORN IN 1929

Gerard Eppele born in 1929. Hst 160x130cm
The great years of the painter.....major work of 1979

The painter-sculptor Gérard Eppelé was born in Cherbourg in 1929. He spent his childhood, around ten years, in Morocco. Returning to France in 1942, he began his studies in a technical college, then entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse for two brief stays (1946 and 1948). He immediately began a personal pictorial research. After two years at the National School of Tapestries in Aubusson, he became a decorative painter for cinema - with Max Bouy -, working for directors such as Renoir, Autan-Lara and Bunuel. He was forced to stop for health reasons; forced to stay for several years in a sanatorium, he began to produce numerous drawings, including a series of portraits of his fellow residents. There he met André Bazin with whom he participated in the creation of a film club. Gérard Eppelé settled in the south-east of France in 1959.
That same year (1959), the meeting with Jean Dubuffet was decisive; he became, for a time, his assistant and Dubuffet allowed him to have his first exhibition at the Chave gallery in Vence (“Drawings of the moment, Petit Bal de Têtes”). Since this date, Gérard Eppelé has continued to paint, draw, sculpt and hold numerous personal or group exhibitions in France and abroad (Germany, Egypt, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Italy, England, Norway and Sweden, United States, Kenya, etc.) have shown their work. The Chave Gallery will organize no less than eight exhibitions of the artist between 1959 and 2000. In 2006, a magnificent exhibition of his work (“The practice of melancholy”) was organized by at the Villa Tamaris in La Seyne/Mer .
In addition to his work as a painter and sculptor, while teaching until 1992 (Villa Arson, Nice), the artist was interested in the world of prints (engravings and lithographs) and, undoubtedly in even more depth , to 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, through the constancy of his work, a direction always held and without bending to fashions, continues to move us. The artist likes to point out that to achieve color, you have to go through black and white. Torment of bodies and minds. Gérard Eppelé has created an original work, his pictorial discourse is an experience of consciousness and the gaze that his very personal vision brings to the world. For him, the act of painting becomes man's lucidity through the pain felt.
Gérard Eppelé, who lived in Tourettes/Loup (Alpes-Maritimes) for a very long time, now lives in Arles.

Ref: D4HNEW0OIF