“
For the past forty years, drawing has asserted itself more on the art market.
Today, having reached maturity, it is clearly distinguished from that of painting on which it depended”
, boasts Louis de Bayser, president of the Salon du dessin, whose 31st edition will be held from March 22 to 27, in Paris.
An event which, for these decades, has striven to show all the richness and variety of these works of paper which have passed through the ages, hands down.
Gouaches, washes, red chalk, watercolours, pastels have won their letters of nobility.
Since the Renaissance, the greatest painters have devoted themselves to this line art, freeing their imagination, conceptualizing the forms of their compositions.
Thanks to the development of the printing press, more accessible paper replaced the expensive vellum and the workshops were full of works on paper, which the artists themselves would love to progress in their art.
“Artists are the first collectors.
They grasp its virtues very quickly, expressing their talent and aesthetic sense.
A drawing by a great master, even a preparatory one, will serve them to nourish and expand their art”
, underlines the gallery owner Laurie Marty de Cambiaire.
Read alsoSalon du dessin: promising features!
Once relegated to their sole role as a preparatory study for painting, works on paper became a creation in their own right when, in the 18th century, artists like François Boucher began to sign their drawings and sell them.
Like Delacroix and Ingres, to name a few, who follow in his footsteps.
The drawing is no longer reduced to a simple academic exercise destined to remain in the boxes, it is exhibited on the walls.
And the following generations followed suit.
Medium of expression
The 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century marked a fruitful period for drawing.
Artists like paper to express their creativity, their artistic vision, their talent.
All the major painters of modern art, from Modigliani, to Picasso, via Cézanne or Chagall, use drawing extensively as a medium of expression.
And today, contemporary art has artists who are dedicated solely to this art.
An unmissable event in the capital, the drawing fair promises a pleasant stroll which welcomes more than thirty exhibitors this year.
For
Le Figaro,
some have lent themselves to the game of deciphering works from different periods.
The creations of the mannerist Parmesan and Simon Vouet illustrate the French and Italian school of the Renaissance and the unclassifiable Chagall modern art.
For contemporary art, the couple of collectors and patrons Daniel and Florence Guerlain, who since 2006 have awarded the show a prize for contemporary drawing, present the three artists selected this year.
With a particularity.
This 16th edition is dedicated to art brut, this artistic sphere where artists devoid of artistic training and of any intellectual approach open a door to a parallel world where free and wild virtuosity is expressed in a vital and spontaneous momentum.
Atypical, the three winners, for whom drawing remains the only means of
Study of a couple of lovers,
Le Parmesan, by gallery owner Laurie Marty de Cambiaire
Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola known as Parmigianino (1503 – 1540).
Study of a pair of lovers;
erotic scene inspired by I Modi
,
131 x 152 mm
.
Pen and brown ink.
Jean-Luc Baroni & Marty de Cambiaire
“The Parmesan is the mannerist artist par excellence, this aesthetic current which follows the High Renaissance, advocating an agitation of forms and a new representation of the canons of antiquity, in reaction against the classical perfection of the Renaissance.
His drawings are part of this movement.
A great admirer of Raphael and Michelangelo, the painter from Parma studied them to turn away from them.
When Parmesan arrives in Rome around 1523, Raphael is dead, and he will rub shoulders with the sphere of the pupils of the prodigy of the Italian Renaissance.
He will notably frequent Giulio Romano, known in France under the name of Jules Romain and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi.
Jules Romain had drawn a series of erotic drawings, a sort of pedagogy of sex, brought together in a book entitled
I Modi
.
These drawings, he entrusts them to Raimondi, who engraves them.
But the Pope, who did not hear it at all that way, imprisoned the engraver in prison and destroyed the works.
This drawing is inspired by one of these engravings.
Parmesan appropriates and reinterprets it, perhaps with a desire to preserve these forbidden images, but also certainly out of a taste for quotation and reference, a typically Mannerist exercise.
Besides its beauty, this drawing reflects the underlying eroticism contained in his paintings.
Curiously, this representation remains quite chaste.
He starts with a very daring engraving to finally restore a very tender image.
We have two lovers with androgynous silhouettes, seated on a seat that we imagine to be antique at the time.
Compared to the initial engraving, Le Parmesan has changed the layout of the arms and legs.
The painter also plays on ambiguity.
The entwined figure can be a woman or a man.
He also deepens his research in another very close drawing, kept in the museum of Budapest, where the being embraced is clearly a man.
Finally, through this exploration of eroticism, it is the painter's desire that is expressed.
Study for a Figure of Hercules Spinning
, Simon Vouet, by Louis de Bayser, President of the Salon du Dessin
Simon Vouet (1590-1649),
Study for a spinning figure of Hercules,
40 x 26 cm.
Black chalk and heightened white chalk on beige paper.
Henri du Cray / De Bayser
“This work by Simon Vouet is a study drawing, made with a view to being inserted into a more ambitious composition.
This preparatory study will be used for the figure of Hercules in the tapestry
Hercule spinning at the feet of Omphale
,
or
Hercules and Omphale
, part of the tapestry of the Loves of the gods kept at the Château de Chambord.
It typically reflects the nature of drawing in the 17th century, an intermediate work executed in the process of making another work.
Some drawings come from the first draft, revealing a somewhat confused aspect, where the artist is looking for a first idea of composition.
Others more finished represent isolated figures putting in place, a movement, a pose.
Vouet's drawing belongs to this second category.
Made in black chalk with white chalk highlights on beige paper, it is a fairly successful stage of conceptualization.
More than a simple sketch, the artist notably reinforces the outlines to support the effects of volume.
In the tapestry, the pose of Hercules will be very close to the preparatory drawing.
Fabulous animal: Fabel-Tier circa 1926-1927,
Marc Chagall, by gallerist Clara al Sidawi
Marc Chagall (1887-1985),
Fabulous animal: Fabel-Tier circa 1926-1927,
66 x 51.5 cm.
Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper laid down on cardboard.
Bailly Gallery
“Chagall used drawing in his work throughout his life as a work in its own right.
When Chagall is asked to illustrate La Fontaine's fables, the artist will use the medium of paper to create gouaches with different techniques.
This work is in line with those he produced for
Les Fables
.
We find the same technicality with very bright colors, animals placed in the foreground and the lack of perspective very typical of this period.
With the cow, Chagall approaches parietal art to transcribe the primary emotions of Man, his thoughts, the world around him.
This primary connotation and this background without perspective create a dreamlike dimension, reinforced by the colors he used.
The cow also symbolizes the link between man, animal and the common nature of these two beings.
The presence of animals in Chagall always has a relationship with the Jewish tradition that permeates the work of this unclassifiable artist.
In a way, he paints Judaic poetry.
Always slipping a notion of time into his work, Chagall uses the cow as a symbol of the past, his roots, his family, his childhood on the Vitebsk farm.
His wife Bella, naked on a bed resting on the animal's forward moving paw, illustrates both his desire, the love he has for her and a gesture resolutely turned towards the future, the path to follow.
Like a dream he wants to be part of.
In a sense, Chagall personifies himself in the cow as he was able to do with the rooster or the donkey.
By this drawing, the
In the running for the drawing prize
The couple of collectors and patrons Daniel and Florence Guerlain decipher the three works in the running for the contemporary drawing prize.
From March 22 to 27, 2023, exhibition of works by selected artists at the Salon du Dessin, at the Palais Brongniart, Place de la Bourse, 75002 Paris.
Announcement of the winner: Thursday, March 23, 2023
Untitled
, Pascal Leyder (Belgian artist born in 1988)
Pascal Leyder (born in 1988),
Untitled,
50 x 70 cm.
Mixed techniques on paper.
Courtesy Escale Nomade, Paris collection Florence and Daniel Guerlain.
Photo credit André Morin.
“Afflicted with trisomy 21, Pascal Leyder expresses himself mainly through drawing.
His work is based on the copying of images of which he gives a personal interpretation.
He draws his inspiration from cartography, comic strips, engraving or sculpture.
This maritime landscape is forged from old engravings.
Pascal Leyder has never been to the seaside. His vision is fantasized, forged from multiple graphic references.
His daring compositions, the outpouring of colors, the lines made in a first draft and never corrected, express a spontaneous, compulsive creation.
With his repetitive gestures, he saturates the space with his tight colored lines executed in marker or ink.
Through this repetition, his technique asserts itself and becomes very advanced.
A simple Michelin map, serving as a support, becomes a dense work.
Cartography particularly inspires him, reflecting his pronounced taste for mixing text and image.
Most of his compositions offer sibylline phrases.
Untitled, 2015
, Mehrdad Rashidi (Iranian artist born in 1963)
Mehrdad Rashidi (born in 1963),
Untitled, 2015,
11.8 x 7.8.
Mixed techniques on recycled paper Courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery, Richmond collection Florence and Daniel Guerlain.
Photo credit André Morin
“With a more precise gesture, this drawing by Mehrdad Rashidi forms undulatory movements to express his fascination with the faces he tirelessly draws.
A phantasmagoric, metaphorical and enigmatic subject, these stylised, multiplied faces with zoomorphic shapes come from another dimension to evoke love, desire, loneliness, happiness or sadness and invite contemplation.
These mysterious compositions reveal the artist's fascination for the investigation of the subconscious.
Summoning his native Iran, which he fled more than twenty years ago after the Islamic revolution, he imbues his work with Persian culture.
The lyrics of songs and the words of the poets of his country adorn his works.
His work, imbued with romanticism, tenderness and nostalgia, unfolds on the most basic supports: a map, stones, books, a piece of wood, recycled paper... In his small apartment in Germany, where he lives today with his two sons, he spends his time compulsively drawing.
Untitled (Woop), 2014
, Melvin Way
Melvin Way (born in 1954),
Untitled (Woop), 2014,
6 x 2.5 inches.
Ballpoint pen and Scotch tape on paper.
Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York Florence and Daniel Guerlain collection.
Photo credit André Morin
“More researched and sophisticated, the drawings of Melvin Way are composed of scientific formulas and mathematical equations.
Real or imaginary, they are thought of as protective talismans.
Suffering from mental disorders, a former drug addict and living on the streets, Melvin Way got out of the stream thanks to his meeting, in 1989, with an artist leading an art workshop in a reception center for the homeless.
Back then, he scribbled down his secret formulas on scraps of paper.
He had hundreds of them that he kept in his pockets, protected by tape.
He lives in another fantasy world in which formulas and diagrams, magnified by the creative gesture, help him to pass to the other side of the mirror to travel in time or to change the world.
Intriguing and overflowing with creativity, his drawings reveal an impenetrable arcane world inhabited by a bewitching mysticism.
Drawing Fair
, Palais Brongniart, Paris 2nd, from
March 22 to 27.