Oil On Canvas Signed Jean Garonnaire

Oil on canvas signed lower right Jean Garonnaire, depicting a fantastic landscape with a character lower right. Dimensions : 65 x 100 cm

Jean Garonnaire born in Saint-Étienne is a painter, aquafortist, also author and illustrator of children's books. After completing his secondary education at the Lycée Charles et Adrien Dupuy in Le Puy-en-Velay, Jean Garonnaire decided at the age of fifteen to join his sister in Elbeuf, where together they were taught by an old Norman painter by the name of Briand. Grateful to this little-known preceptor to whom he would say he owed his technical knowledge of painting and his way of perceiving the sensitive world, Jean Garonnaire then studied at the École des arts appliqués in Beaune from 1962 to 1964, before dividing his time between advertising design and a job with the Lyon newspaper Le Progrès (Saint-Étienne edition), which supported his first solo exhibitions, in Saint-Étienne in 1967, and in Firminy in 1969 in collaboration with Appelou poet-painter-sculptor Jean-Marie Maurin. (Le Progrès 1969).

It was in 1973 that Jean Garonnaire began writing and illustrating children's stories, imagining Le pays disparu, a marvelous place whose Lilliputian inhabitants, from their tree-top homes, live in complicity with the sun. This first book was noticed by Bernard Clavel who, himself writing stories and short stories for children, approached him in 1974 with a view to a collaboration that would become friendly and begin with Le voyage de la boule de neige.

Christophe Meunier, referring to La tour part en voyage (1974), the second book written and illustrated by our artist and also published by Editions La Farandole, attributes to Jean Garonnaire's books a geographical and social dimension which, through this concern to make his young readership aware of the "monotony of large housing estates", the "greyness of concrete" and the "functional spatial organization", participates in the publisher's interest in the "phenomenon of large housing estates". Referring to Connaissez-vous Razibus le chevelu? (1977), Denyse Bourneuf emphasizes how Jean Garonnaire encourages interaction between author and young reader: "On every page, we discover an unusual detail about this strange character. At the end, the child is invited to draw him in his entirety, as he imagines him."

In Jean Garonnaire's painting, observes Jean-Pierre Chopin, "genetic memory is deliberately amnesiac, the mineral is forgotten in the vegetable, the vegetable in the animal. Garonnaire has chosen the mute esotericism of color, where the enigma of the permanent blossoming of beings and things is lost in marvelous shifting glazes". For Claude Tournay, the work verges on the conception of a "long poem" which, in "its structuring on several levels", takes on "dimensions outside real space and time": "with Garonnaire, the phenomenon occurs that Paul Claudel noted about a Vermeer painting; we don't look at it: immediately we are inside it, we inhabit it."