Gérard Fromanger
PEINTURE-MONDE
Black carbon
2015

A painting made in 2015, terribly topical today: a group of people piled up in an inflatable raft. Above, a crowd advances, indifferent to the boat. I notice that the sea is black and that the artist’s distinctive colors can be seen, in the form of several circles. This is the last work of art painted by Fromanger. Sentimental crowds, street scenes, portraits of philosophical comrades such as Barthes, Deleuze or Foucault: Fromanger injects color into a relation to the world in which he includes himself, through which he fights, paint brushes in hand (or using electrical tape) employing press photographs that he projects onto his paintings containing figures linked together by a serpentine line or tattooed with dashes of primary colors, slightly cold, purple or watery green.

About the artist

Born in 1939 in Pontchartrain, Gérard Fromanger lives and works in Paris. One of the pioneers of the return to figuration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in France, Gérard Fromanger became a leading figure of figuration narrative. Friend of sculptor César, with whom he shared a studio, and of Alberto Giacometti, Fromanger joined the figuration narrative artists at the Salon de mai in 1964 and 1965 and soon be- came involved in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Depicting urban environments and anonymous passers-by, his painting technique was close to photography. As a founding member of the Atelier Populaire at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he also produced various collective and political serigraphy works during the May 1968 events.

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From the series “The heart does what it wants”. Courtesy: the artist