LAUTRéDOU ?
You probably don't know his name. But once you've discovered his work, you'll fall in love with these abstractions where the signs and traces are anything but innocent. We loved it. A splendid encounter to delight our readers.
Gérard Gamand
When Guiseppina, a beautiful young brunette from Calabria with fiery eyes and a dazzling smile, met Jean-Yves LAUTRéDOU, she was barely 18. He was an adventurer, a mountaineer, a "rabochon" (very bad tempered in Savoyard), a loner, burning with a feverish passion for painting, skiing and mythical summits, and he let himself be captured. It was love at first sight! These two have been accomplices for over twenty years now. They live in osmosis. She looks after her man", as she calls him. She organises an acceptable daily routine for him. He, immersed to the point of madness in the exaltation of painting, doesn't see the hours, the days, the nights, the announcements go by.
Magnificent Guiseppina, courageous, stubborn, jealous, you could see her in an Italian film from the 1950s. She'd be singing, drying her washing by the window, calling out to her sister from window to window - in short! The bubbling of simple, sensual, gourmet life. We had just discovered a painter, totally unknown to us, who delighted us. He is exactly what we expect from painting: emotion, humanity, pleasure, authenticity and talent. We're going to help Lautrédou emerge in the public eye, because we can't bear to see such a mess. Frankly, how can we accept that these artists are in such dire straits? Tossed around between arrogant and blind pseudo-galleries, who want to charge the painter for agreeing to exhibit his work! Art magazines that will only open their columns for cash, for pseudo-editorials of convenience, and even then only on condition that they provide their own text and images! (Yes, it does exist, apparently! Editor's note).
All kinds of crooks promising everything and delivering nothing! How can you resist what is fast becoming a financial nightmare? How do you keep on painting against all odds? There's only one answer: you need a Guiseppina by your side! But alas, that's not enough. But let's start by discovering our man in his lair. A feverish and exclusive passion.
"I really like Buddhist philosophy. It gives me the impression that you can build your life on values and principles... without pissing other people off". confides this loner. (During this superb meeting, which lasted a whole day, he often returned to this idea of not "bugging" other people. He is stubbornly moving in one direction: towards painting. He was so greedy for it that sometimes he couldn't stop a canvas. So he destroys it and starts again. Every day, he goes down into his "cellar", his lair, to immerse himself in his bubbling work. "There's never any anxiety when you go downstairs. It's all pleasure. An incredible joy in front of the canvas. I let my arm go, it goes on its own, it invents, it moves. There's a sort of second character inside me who paints. It escapes me and brings to the surface an unconscious that I don't know. It's extremely curious and, to put it bluntly, completely schizophrenic! When Jean-Yves speaks, when he's confident, there's no stopping him. It's a flow that leaps over all barriers. His passion brings out the words with youthful impetuosity. Ideas are jostled around, sometimes even lost along the way. "I recently discovered the concept of the "eidetic image", an imaginary representation of incredible clarity. For example, when you look at a cloud, you can clearly see a face or a horse and so on. This corresponds exactly to my painting. My hallucinatory images are always terrible. There are only skulls, suffering and grimacing faces. These are the things that animate my pictorial impulses... Fortunately, I'm the only one who sees this in my painting. I see when I paint, but I paint blind! Why didn't he choose the path of figurative Expressionism to try and represent this unconscious world, as artists like Arickx, Rustln and others do? Jean-Yves' answer is immediate: "Pain is everywhere on earth. I don't think the painter's job is to rub salt in the wound. Painting has to remain that little square of happiness, of discovery, an invitation to travel. I have no desire to annoy people..." (Ed. note).
LAUTRéDOU has a curious mix of love for others and detestation for the human race. Of everyday optimism and dull metaphysical anguish. He switches from one to the other almost instantaneously. "The canvas we create becomes a shock or a revelation for anyone not wearing the blinkers of art history. A willing utopian, an unrepentant dreamer, non-violent and a touch libertarian, he takes his shaven Buddhist monk's head and his skinny frame on the road to painting. He is voluble. Too much, perhaps. He goes off in all directions, at the risk of confusing his audience. "That's my problem. I love everything. I'm so greedy that I can't resist adding one more ingredient. Often at the risk of losing my canvas. One more drop of paint and it's good to go. Sometimes I don't know when to stop.
Yet we have seen some admirable canvases. They are all, among others, from his "Traits d'union" series. We love these traces that seem to come from far away. From the very depths of humanity, as it were. The workmanship is absolutely admirable. It's beautiful painting. But what use is it if no one knows about it? "For a long time I thought it was very vain to want to show your work. This is no longer the case. The painter wrote a few words that we find very apt. "I am a servant of the imagination, the canvas being the chalice offered to the public, which can contain good wine as well as excellent poison. By painting from ourselves and our own feelings, the canvas we create becomes a shock or a revelation for anyone not wearing the blinkers of Art History." Meanwhile, Guiseppina has prepared us a superb chilli con carne, which we'll wash down with a generous Savoyard red. Life is good. Our hosts are fascinating. The paintings all around us are silent and yet so meaningful. We'd like these moments to last. Looking at the paintings we have chosen to reproduce in the magazine, don't you think this painter is magnificent? Art critic Edel Poire, who knows LAUTRéDOU well, wrote: "LAUTRéDOU has a poetic eye for the world. He translates it into finds brimming with mocking tenderness, or on the contrary, into strong strokes, like those of a deep-water draughtsman. By going beyond the stage of the image, he achieves limpidity and fluidity, as much as he engulfs himself in spirited abstractions. Does he have "absolute spontaneity", as we say of the ear in music? Who knows? Good point, not when you think that this painter is rowing, for the moment, in the depths of anonymity! Strange times.
