« An artist who painted in almost total secrecy from the interwar period to the 21st century». His beginnings are promising. His meeting with Picasso as a teenager, decisive. At the age of 29, Jean-Michel Coulon participates in the group exhibition at Jeanne Bucher Gallery alongside Braque, Picasso, Klee, Lanskoy, Staël, Vieira da Silva, Kandinsky. The following year, in 1950, the gallery devoted a solo exhibition to him which attracted the entire art world.

After an exhibition that same year in New York, organized by Leo Castelli at the Sidney Janis Gallery, which confronted American paintings with the School of Paris, the painter declined almost all exhibitions to lock himself in his studio. Praised by his peers who met with fame, Jean-Michel Coulon refused the recognition of the general public for the rest of his life.

It was at his death in 2014, that Aline Stalla-Bourdillon, his daughter, discovered a structured abstract body of work of more than 900 paintings and collages, unpublished and intact, presented today to the public.

Rationale for the exhibition

Seduced by this painting, Patrice de Ginestet immersed himself in the still unknown work, gradually revealed by his daughter. This exhibition echoes the recent publication of the artist's catalog raisonné which describes, in three volumes (bilingual French/English), his entire creative life from the age of 7 to 94.

The artworks

This is a retrospective exhibition covering the entire evolution of the artist's work: oils with preparatory drawings from the 1940s, the highly textured ones from the 1950s, those whose verticality is very marked in the 1960s, the reduced formats with cheerful colors, sometimes striated with a file from the 1970s to the 1990s, and finally the brilliant collages that the painter began in 2000 at the age of 80, on old oil paintings and then on paper. Some gouaches complete the set. Jean-Michel Coulon works with light. He plays with light on the surface with shiny or matte effects, also with transparency or opacity, and finally with the textural results of brushstrokes. Is it inspired by his study of Vermeer in Amsterdam in his youth?

About thirty (34) works have been selected and are hung in chronological order.

The Gallery 50 at La Cadière d’Azur

Passionate about modern art and collector of artists from the School of Paris, La Jeune Peinture and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Patrice de Ginestet opened his first gallery in La Cadière d'Azur, in 2017.

Given the growing success of the Gallery 50 Blanquerie, Patrice de Ginestet opens the Gallery 50 Péri in 2021, with the collaboration of Antoine Crumeyrolle. Both are Cadierens by adoption, fallen under the charm of the medieval village and anxious to meet the expectations of amateurs and collectors, from the area or on holiday.

The Gallery 50 Péri highlights from July 1st to August 31st a solo exhibition of the French post-war abstract painter, certainly the most secretive, Jean-Michel Coulon.