Les Callanques Work By Raymond Guerrier (1920-2002 Dated January 1965 Signed Lower Left

Inscribed on the back: Les Callanques 54.5 cm x 36.5 cm -Oeuvre De Raymond Guerrier (1920-2002 Dated January 1965 Signed Lower Left - Raymond Guerrier is a painter from the School of Paris born January 3, 1920 in Paris He had lived since 1955 in Eygalières where he died on April 5, 2002. The oldest listed painting by Raymond Guerrier dates from 19341. Self-taught, the artist situates in his early youth, made for much of the frequentation of museums, the shaping of the austere temperament and the refusal of the picturesque which will characterize him. As an artist of the rigor, he affirms thus: "the great old ones especially taught me the primordial importance of the severe composition" 2. Raymond Guerrier says himself marked by the exhibition Georges Braque, les ateliers, which he visited at the Galerie Maeght in 19473. At the very beginning of the 1950s, while painting, he necessarily worked as a photoengraver.4 Receiving the Young Painting Prize for his canvas Landscape with a mask in 1953, i In 1954 he was a member of the jury alongside Paul Rebeyrolle, Bernard Buffet and André Minaux, three painters with whom he then had in common to position himself, by dark works, by a harshness stemming from the pessimism of the post -war, following Francis Gruber5,6. It was in 1955 that he discovered Provence7 and that, "solitary and taciturn in character, he preferred to move away from Paris and live in Eygalières" 8 where he befriended the Provençal poet Charles Galtier. In 1961, he married Francesca, daughter of the painter Francis Montanier (1895-1974) 9, herself a painter, but also a ceramicist. In 1962 birth of their daughter Juliette, in 1964 their son Francis and in 1966 their daughter Jeanne. The landscape which surrounds him in Eygalières, as well as his travels which offer him to see Spain, Sardinia, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Jordan, Israel, bring Raymond Guerrier, from 1970, to lighten his palette (remaining nevertheless in "austere nude tones dominated by ochres" observes Gérald Schurr), then to gradually slide towards abstraction, the result of "a figuration reduced to its essence, a painting of large forms where only the essential rhythms are retained7 ”. Pierre Basset, in his approach to a work that spans nearly seven decades, confirms what Raymond Guerrier's demanding quest was: “search for the essential, rejection of the anecdote, importance of reality and its depth, role -key of matter "