ALFRED DEFOSSEZ BORN IN 1932

SUPERB OIL ON CANVAS 116X81CM. A LITHOGRAPHY WAS MADE FROM THIS PAINTING.
Starting to paint at the age of fifteen, Alfred Defossez followed courses at the Académie Julian in Paris for four years, with Pierre Jérôme as his master, then entered the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in 1956 to paint being a student of Roger Chapelain-Midy, Pierre-Henri Ducos de La Haille and Boris Taslitzky. He was selected for the Young Painting prize in 1957.
Alfred Defossez evokes “the light of summer” as a major source of inspiration for his work and in this regard likes to quote Arthur Rimbaud to express his perception of “the countryside crossed by bands of rare music”.

Critical reception

“In Defossez’s painting, priority is given to form, but to form as something never completed, as something elementary. He has the art of flat volumes, practices the cube and the rounded, the vertical and the horizontal, but escapes the austere formalism of cubist theories. It decomposes, de-perspectives, geometrizes too, but without system. In his painting, the dialogue of the figurative and the abstract has remained uninterrupted. Possible women desire each other, nonchalant, behind the kaleidoscopic bursting of bouquets with angular softness. Its blues, its yellows sigh lip to lip in an incomparable green of shades where mauves and pinks curl up. Somewhere on the canvas, under a clear sky, contrasting admirably with the geometry of the landscape, the attention is blurred in the plants which always become cloudy. » - Jean-Pierre Chopin
“His graphics are that of an engraver: sensitive, quick to highlight chiaroscuros. His drawings demonstrate a refined craft, powerful and flexible at the same time. Always, in his work, characters who reflect the fantastic and nudes coexist, portraits which are part of the purest classical tradition. If he represents landscapes in drawing, Defossez excels in rendering, through orbs, the trees that he draws with a line, with a pen... For him, the drawing corresponds to an ultra-sensitive film which, once activated, reproduces very quickly what she captured about a being, or a movement (sport, races in particular, horses are an inherent part of her theme. In the same way as a spontaneous and very sensitive drawing, Defossez considers that the artist must let himself be carried away, even if it means repeating this first draft with his pen, to go further... With such high demands on oneself, it is normal that Defossez can find a place alongside masters such as Marcel Gromaire and Jacques Villon." - Bertrand Duplessis
“Landscapes, racing scenes, views of Paris, the artist synthesizes the atmosphere and light of his subjects in cold colors and quite systematically geometricizes the landscape into essential lines. » - Gerald Schurr
“In a very elliptical style, he removes all detail, reducing the elements of his compositions to their simplest structure. This austerity of form is, however, compensated by colorful indications which revive the figured reality. » - Benezit
“this famous chromatic freedom, which he disciplines and releases in turn, allows him to structure a certain geometry of the landscape and a spontaneous modulation of the touch. He obtains a muted sound of color, a contrasting effusion, the differentiating elements of which contribute to a side by side of transparencies, translucent blurs, faded contours, in a range of half-tones where shades of gray subtly play , pink, degraded or magnified white, with tones of pastel, red and yellow, green, brown and gold from which elongated silhouettes emerge reminiscent of the tapestries of Bernard Cathelin. He has a predilection for large, cloudless skies, a streak of night or dawn, stretched to the edge of the horizon, where he perceives these bands of rare music that he collects like a scattered treasure. » - Camille Sautet

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