Ceysson & Bénétière

Born in 1926, in Paris, France.

Died in 2012, in Paris, France.

   Presentation

Louttre.B is a painter and printmaker whose honed technique combines personal engravings with a varied color palette, working often in a larger scale. Louttre.B's paintings follow the same ethos present in Abstract Art in their attempts to capture the bare essential with simplified forms and warm and vivid colors. His œuvres express a sentiment of fullness that gives us, the viewer, a glimpse into to the eternal nature of the world.

   Awards & Decorations

1971    Lauréat de la Biennale de l’estampe, Épinal

1967    Lauréat de la Triennale de Grenchen

1967    Lauréat de la cinquième Biennale de gravure de Tōkyō - prix O’Hara

1965    Lauréat du prix des Onze, Paris

1961    Lauréat de la deuxième Biennale de Paris

   Public collections

Mobilier national, Paris

Bibliothèque nationale, Paris

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris

Musée national d’histoire et d’art, Luxembourg

Musée de l’Évêché, Évreux

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen

Musée des Beaux-Arts - l’Échevinage, Saintes

Musée de Gajac, Villeneuve-sur-Lot (dépositaire de l’œuvre gravé de Louttre.B, 1963-1983)

Musée Despiau-Wlérick, Mont-de-Marsan

Victoria and Albert Museum, Londres

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen

Musée municipal de l’Évêché, Limoges

Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble

LAAC, Dunkerque

Taylor Institute et Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Grande-Bretagne

Centre d’art contemporain Raymond Farbos, Mont-de-Marsan

Musée de Sens (dépositaire de l’œuvre gravé de Louttre.B, 1984-2006)

Musée Henri Martin, Cahors

   Monumental works

Plafond peint, chapelle du Castel, Valence-d’Agen, 2005

LP Étienne-Jules Marey, Boulogne, 1991

Villa Dominique, Boissiérettes (Lot), 1990

Mosaïque (marbre et galets, 60 m2), commande de la Compagnie La Hénin, Monaco, 1985

Girouettes (bois et fer), Boissiérettes, 1978

Pyramide et Forum, avec Louis Nallard, ENNA, Nantes, 1977

Mur et Forum, Carhaix, 1976

Mosaïque (briques et galets), école de Meux, Compiègne, 1976

Jardin de pierres dressées, Boissiérettes, 1976

Mosaïque (pâte de verre, 50 m2), hôpital militaire de Pourvourville, Toulouse, 1976

La Regue verte (bois brûlé, 2 x 3 m), Arcachon, 1976

Sculpture en éléments (ciment taillé), Treignac, 1975

Sculpture à escalader (ciment polychrome), Bassens, 1973

8 sculptures et un jardin de pierres, lycée technique des Terres-Rouges, Cahors, 1972

Sculptures et jardin, lycée Jean Lurçat, Ris-Orangis, 1972

Pendule en porcelaine et médaillons, Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, 1972

L’Enseigne de l’amour (bas-relief en grès, 1,94 x 2,96 m), Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, 1971

Les Admirateurs de l’heure, ensemble de 6 sculptures en ciment taillé, Boissiérettes, 1971

Fontaine (grès), Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, installée au parc floral de Vincennes, 1968

Bas-relief (béton et galets, 175 m2) et 8 sculptures (ciment taillé) incluses dans le mur d’enceinte du lycée de Gourdon (Lot), 1968

Sculpture (ciment coulé et peint, hauteur 5 m), Soulac-sur-Mer, 1968

Sculptures (ciment taillé) et sol, faculté des lettres, Bordeaux-Pessac, 1967

Carton de tapisserie pour la manufacture de Beauvais, 1967

Ensemble de 12 sculptures monumentales (ciment taillé teinté), Boissiérettes, 1966

Sculpture (ciment taillé), lycée de Cajarc (Lot), 1966

Renaissance d’une chapelle (mosaïque de galets, autel de béton, vitraux, chemin de croix, plafond peint, broderie murale), église Saint-Pierre de Boissiérettes, 1965

Composition, carton de tapisserie pour la Manufacture nationale des Gobelins, Paris, 1964

Cartons de tapisserie pour Tamara Moulinier et Plasse Le Caisne, 1964

Vitraux à Marignier et Annemasse (église Saint-Joseph), 1961

Carton de tapisserie pour l’Atelier Plasse Le Caisne, 1955

PAINTING NATURALLY

What strikes immediately about Louttre.B's paintings is the strength of their obviousness, their immediacy, and the pleasure they express. Louttre.B does not paint on the basis of any concept, project, or convention of or about the act of painting or the painting itself. He paints from within the painting. As if this medium were, for him, a mode of expressing the condition of being in the world as natural as speech can be–an act as simple as walking. Naturally bilingual (in speech and painting), he does not feel the need to justify what he does, much less justify it to himself, within his work. Bissière used to say: I paint as the apple tree gives apples. Louttre.B, in this sense, was born an apple tree. This is the reason for the ease that we notice in his occupation of the space of the canvas and in his arrangement of colors. Performing and playing with references to different genres of painting (landscapes or still lifes, for example), or recurring problematics (background/motif or figure; surface/depth; frame...) as an exercise of the medium; juxtaposing them in a daring mosaic of planes and ranges of color in a confounding harmony. But this ease is only in appearance. Louttre.B chisels his painting like a writer polishes his sentences. The constructions are, in fact, scholarly and the juxtaposition and treatment of colors, which pass like a letter in the mail, are actually quite audacious. It has been written many times that his paintings are rooted in the landscapes of his native Quercy. There is little chance however that the sky of Quercy is red or yellow like straw and that the grounds are blue like the sea–if there are skies and grounds in his work at all. The reference of these ‘landscapes’ are rather interior. Not even landscapes from elsewhere that exist primarily in the form of a faded memory, but rather the expression of a poem, of the sensitive and emotional. The figures–silhouettes of trees or flowers, a few features that outline a house, the possible roundness of an apple or the oval of a lemon, the curve of a hill–borrow from primitive forms which in turn conceptualizes them. Their purpose is not to be evocative of meaning or to establish a mediated relation to reality. These are stimuli that come from inside the painting, from which they borrow codes: facilitators of emotions, carriers of imaginations. In reality, these forms are, above all, pretexts and frameworks onto which the plays of colors cling. Which, when you think about it, now more than ever, is the real reason for painting. Painting is, first of all, the resonance of color which activate and vibrate the viewer’s emotions. The figures merely act a bridge, amplifying what the viewer immediately experiences by offering the possibility of enriching their feelings with personal references–like Proust’s madeleine. A form to capture the gaze, which reassures the viewer and frees them from the burden of understanding. Since there is nothing to understand; rather simply to see beyond the gaze. It is also a way for the artists to contain the exuberance of his painting, of hanging it up on the branches, so as not to let it play its game alone. A restraint, a modesty, heirs to a long tradition, which tries to preserve the expression of the sensitive, the freedom of form, the risks of emphasis. In which Louttre.B participates through his project of harmony and exchange.

In Louttre.B’s mind, the painter is a mediator. He chose to express the astonishment of living. His work evokes the surprise one feels when experiencing the hunger and happiness of ‘being’, which he conveys through his own joy of ‘doing’. But this happiness is not easy for the artist–he knows it. In the painting, gazes intersect: the uncertain, waiting gaze of the viewer, with that of the painter looking at him from the inside. With this promise made, for a hypothetical meeting, which is always postponed, the artist puts himself in play. He takes a risk commensurate with what he has invested. It is a dangerous game insofar as he who gives throws his word to the wind as does the tree when it releases its pollen, as the fish spreads its seed in the sea. However, for the artist who sows, without knowing who will receive his offering and how, awaits a necessary return. And what he also knows is this: that this meeting will only be partial and mediate. That it will never be a dialogue.

The play on words in the titles act as a screen. They proclaim, conversely, that there is no such thing as innocent painting, just as there are never words that mean nothing. All words and all paintings are an act of seizure, an affirmation of being there, at a time when the exchange can succeed or fail. That the painting is a stake. That it can be the place and the opportunity for misunderstanding. It is the gravity of such a moment of postponed encounter–where what he has posed cannot be repeated–that Louttre.B tries to defuse, by a pirouette, by resorting to the irony of words, using the title to evacuate the subject and place it elsewhere. He does this as a means of allowing the viewer the full enjoyment of their feelings. This gravity which underlies his painting is the reason for this aforementioned restraint. The jubilation expressed does not avoid obvious nostalgia. What are the reasons for painting today when other more technological media have been developed? If not to express otherwise unspeakable emotions, to build impossible imaginations, by exploiting the extraordinary flexibility of a medium which completely physically implicates the artists in a way other materials can’t. The sincerity resulting from this embedded commitment elicits empathy, while the materiality of the painting imposes its presence. It is in this exchange that we find the essential condition of Louttre.B’s work. When it is materially completed and the artist has distanced himself, this is what the work expresses to those who recognize themselves in it.

Jean-Paul Blanchet