Roger-Edgar Gillet at Nathalie Obadia

Second episode of the resurrection of Roger-Edgar Gillet (1924-2004), after a first presentation in 2021. His notoriety, great in the 1960s, declined thereafter. His fault ? Having been abstract, like most French painters of his generation, and then having convinced himself that it was more interesting to look at and show the world. The exhibition, which shows thirty years of work, from 1966 to 1997, proves him right. With short, clear gestures inscribed in a dense pictorial material, in a severe chromaticism of ochres and browns, Gillet brings out single figures and group scenes. The first are satirical and political: bigots – the artist’s word – infatuated with religion and judges intoxicated with power. The latter are among the cruelest and most just things of the time. Gillet reduces Club Méditerranée tourists in Marrakech to the domination they enjoy exercising over the Moroccan population. Concerts by large orchestras turn into collective hysteria, sincere or not. The female nudes, which could be erotic, fall into the grotesque and an exhibitionism that one suspects is strictly commercial. Contemporary society thus passes into a grinding machine that leaves nothing intact. We would like to see these paintings alongside those of Bacon and Rebeyrolle. If their manners have nothing in common, their authors share the same disgust for their fellow men.