Gustave Singier

The Port , dated 1950
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated “50”
Size: 25 x 22cm
With frame: 41.5 x 48.5 cm
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The viewer can discern the black masts of the boats and the hulls. The sea, green, gives a completely different dimension to the painting: the eye scans the nuanced surface of the canvas, punctuated by black lines, as if reading a musical score.

Gustave Singier was born in Belgium and lived in Paris until the effervescence of 1980. All his life, the painter evolves in a prolific creative universe. he painted a few cartoons for stained glass windows and tapestries, mosaics, illustrated books and designed costumes for Jean Villar’s Théâtre National Populaire and for the Paris Opera. Painter of the new school of Paris, he is a professor at the Académie Rançon and belongs to the group of “Non-Figuratives”.

From the post-war period until the 1960s, abstract painting flourished in Paris. However, his posterity is diminished by his historical successors. On the one hand, the avant-gardes reappeared (neo-Dadaism, neo-Reaslime, neo-Fauvism) and on the other, the painters of the next generation slipped away from Paris to model themselves on the great painters of the American abstraction still unknown in France.

Without ever fully detaching himself from reality, he strives to represent what he sees. Reality serves as a repertoire of form. The painter transposes, deforms and reforms reality to better show it in another register. If we know that geometric abstraction is never far from its way and its touch. The port is a watercolor that plays on the unity released by the shades of colors to magnify the black lines that indicate the mats.

Bibliography:

• Jean Musy, Jean-Jacques Aillagon and Bernard Dorival, Bertholle, Chastel, Singier , [exhibition at the National School of Fine Arts, January 27 – March 2, 1982], Paris, National School of Fine Arts, 1982

• Cat. exp. Camille Bourniquel, Pierre Cabanne, Gustave Singier , [exhibition at the Adriano Villata gallery, 7 Feb. – March 8, 1981] Rome, Galleria Adriano Villata, 1981

• Pierre Encrevé, “SINGIER GUSTAVE – (1909-1984)”, Encyclopædia Universalis [en ligne]

Museums and exhibitions:

• Exhibition at the Adriano Villata gallery, 7 Feb. – March 8, 1981, Rome

• “Dynamic Space” fresco, University of the city of Villeuneuve d’Ascq