Originally from Sarthe, Bruno Gauclain saw a lot of landscapes during his 30-year career as a gendarme. But in Lebanon, in Armenia, in Corsica, in all latitudes and in all seasons, he above all observed things and people and retained the need to exchange. “I was a mountain policeman“, he likes to repeat. But for a long time, his favorite trails have been those that he came to travel with his wife, whenever he could, under the sky of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Upon retirement, they settled in Forcalquier.
And one day, during a walk, he met Mady Foty, a painter teacher who was quick to count Bruno among her students. The former gendarme had the soul of a poet, but he discovered a talent as a painter. And then, as luck would have it, a new meeting with Yvon Bonnaffoux, an established artist whose oils created with a knife gave Bruno the desire to “knead, knead”, painting and encouraged him to change medium .
Now installed in his new gallery, Bruno has reduced his equipment to “a tube for each primary color, two knives… it fits in a shoebox“.
He mixes his colors on a black ceramic plate, before spreading them on a white canvas where “they shine, they burst“. So Bruno works on the material, the “slashes it, crushes it, kneads it“, and works shot by shot, always starting with the sky. The result is landscapes of astonishing finesse, bucolic perspectives, a corner of a garden overgrown with broom or an old wall at the edge of a path where we want to adventure.local landscaper“he mainly paints on photos taken during his hikes, and also reproduces the photos that”people in love with their heritage“, bring him. And to share his almost carnal relationship with painting he does not hesitate to encourage each visitor to “touch, caress” his paintings to better feel the slightest relief.
At the back of the gallery, his wife Sylvie is renovating the frames she collects and adapting them to her husband’s paintings: “team work“, comments Bruno. And as soon as a schoolboy, seeing him in front of his easel, is bold enough to enter, he finds himself with a brush in his hand, gently encouraged to paint what he wants. To express, quite simply , the wonder that life inspires in him.
Inauguration on Saturday May 18 from 6 p.m. “Galerie Coquelic’oh” – 9, rue Louis Andrieux in Forcalquier.
