Jean Couy "study For Hollyhocks" Gouache, 1976 Protée Gallery Toulouse

Jean Couy (1910-19983) "Study for Hollyhocks" Gouache on paper, signed and dated 1976. Label of the Galerie Protée, rue Croix Baragnon in Toulouse. Jean Couy is defined as a painter and engraver of lyrical abstraction or abstract expressionism, this approach is tempered by Jean-Pierre Delarge who places the artist in impressionist abstraction at the beginning of the 1950s to see him return, at the end of the 1960s, to a figuration where the plant dominates, with "plane geometries spread between the groves and the high forests and treated in sepia which compete with the purplish". While in 1967 Georges Boudaille observed that "he was thus kept at a distance both by the pure abstract artists, who could not accept the bucolic inspiration of his paintings, and by the figurative clan, radically opposed to the formulation of a thought in painting by specifically plastic means", René Huyghe and Jean Rudel were able, in 1970, to place Jean Couy with Gérald Collot, Géula Dagan, Olivier Debré, Paul Kallos, Robert Lapoujade and Georges Romathier on the side of a "pure synthesis" where the artist's concern "is no longer to represent an imitated, copied nature, but to fix a perception of the world at the center of the elements". In this same vein, Lydia Harambourg substitutes the term “stylized figuration” for pure abstraction, while Gérard Xuriguera speaks of “soft figurations, enriched by their passage through abstraction” where he places Jean Couy, alongside painters such as Claude Garache, François Jousselin, Louttre.B, Xavier Valls or Jacques Vimard, in an “approach to the observed not subservient to the photographic document, not objectified by the recording eye of a cold gaze”, in this charm which, “according to Vladimir Jankélévitch, is not only always absent and always elsewhere, but also perpetually later”. Frame dimensions: 40.5 x 30.5 cm Dimensions of the work (on view): 25 x 17