Fauves Colors

Neo-fauves - Marseille

In a Fauvist painting, the colours are vibrand, exacerbated, but above all used in a raw manner, as they are, without being mixed together on the palette. This way of painting was unconventional for that time.

Fauvism, an artistic movement from the beginning of the 20th century, found a favourite subject in nature, particularly the landscapes of the south of France. Here, the south, and more particularly Marseille, is the common ground and soil of this trio of guest artists/creative studios. Nature is not a subject, it is intrinsic to their approach and a support for their work. Nature is matter, material, resource, gleaning, collection, transformation. It is the support and the meaning.

Like any self-respecting Fauvist, the subject is not reality, it is a questioning to get away from it. These projections between imagery and use will also become a close reality, a common reality in a game of correspondences between the approaches and the materials used.

Prime the idea of the touch, the simplification of forms and of a gentle but frontal radicality.

Fauvist colours inhabit the space. All gleaming. Ochre, reddish, yellow, beige, brown, the shades of the earth’s substratum that dress and adorn the landscape from the Sainte-Victoire to the slopes of Estaque, trough the coasts of Frioul, take over the pieces that are tailor-made to inhabit the half-intimate, half-public art space Avenue du Roi.

The natural landscape of the Phocaean city, between a very marked urbanity and a string of clayey limestone reefs, its diversity and eclecticism, arouse exaltation and deployment. The horizon of possibilities summons a fauvism spirit, the fauvism colours.

We will be pleased to read in this exaltation of the colours of a half-urban and half-wild landscape, in the materials used and their deployment in space, as a neo-fauvism movement that would win over the city and the local art scene.

Finally, this exacerbated exaltation invites us, through the different pieces presented, to contemplate an elsewhere born from here.