Bernard Lorjou (1908-1986) Large Still Life

Large oil painting on parquet panel signed B. LORJOU (Bernard Lorjou 1908-1986) Post-cubist composition around 1950 animated by a sober and dense lyricism punctuated by a fauve palette with primary colors of a brutal appearance but with pure tones. Work produced on an excellent parqueted wooden support called an altarpiece panel, the acquisition of which is expensive for the painter and opulent for its creation which becomes durable because this support is very resistant to the vagaries of time in the manner of the remarkable paintings of the high -period using this material. Dimensions: 93 cm x 80 cm. Beautiful neoclassical frame in gilded wood. Bernard Lorjou, born in Blois on September 8, 1908, is one of the most fascinating French artists of the 20th century, through his work and his personality, he disturbs or even upsets the artistic world of his time, he willingly attacks the order established as well as the proponents of abstract art, in the 1950s he was one of those young painters loving humanity who fought just like Francis Bacon, Balthus, Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper or Giorgio Morandi who reaffirmed a vision of art made of flesh and earth and how the second part of the 20th century is not that of the void but that of the figure reinvented by numerous individuals to impose a figuration that modernity wanted to forever dissolve, all of life de Lorjou will be devoted to these battles, never admitting defeat. An intuitive colorist, he achieves a chromaticism whose audacity is only the expression of a truth which is intended to be the interpretation of the meaning of his painting. Lorjou affirms the demand for humanism and humanity in art, alongside individual aesthetic research; he will also be the initiator of the “L’Homme Témoin” group. He is disgusted by injustices: racial segregation, social problems, colonial conflicts, misery and poverty in France and in the world, power and sectarian excesses, diseases and epidemics. He denounces the risks of pollution of the planet, their deleterious effects and the dangers of certain uncontrolled energy sources. In short, Lorjou was in all the fights.