Gerard Titus-Carmel

Titus Carmel copia

Brisées – sur la route de la soie XII (2009), acrylic on canvas, 351 x 215 cm / 175 x 175 cm

Biographical elements

Born in Paris on October 10, 1942, Gérard Titus-Carmel lives and works in Oulchy-le-Château, in Picardy. He studied at the Ecole Boulle in Paris from 1958 to 1962, in the engraving section, and since then he has devoted his work to  painting, drawing, engraving and writing. His first works were shown at the Paris Biennale in 1963, followed by 300 one-man shows in France and throughout the world, where his works can be found in collections of over a hundred museums and public institutions. He has represented France in many international exhibitions and has created monumental paintings, among others, for the Great Hall of the Financial Ministry in Paris (1989), the Cité des Congrès in Nantes (1990), and the Olivier Messiaen Hall of the DRAC Champagne-Ardenne, in Chalons-en-Champagne (1994).  As an author, he has published over fifty books of poetry and essays on art and literature. The complete works of his writings on art will be published in 2016 by l’Atelier contemporain/ François-Marie Deyrolle.

Short Chronology

From the beginning of the 70’s, and after several reconstitutions,  his work has been organized in suites and series, each dated and titled, which, one after the other, form a long narrative of loss, led to the edge of void and absence. Then followed long sequences of drawings on forms of dislocation and rupture, deconstruction and splice, all central to a work whose conceptual investigations and graphic preoccupations interpenetrate each other, until the most recent series of drawings and paintings on landscape, clustered foliage, superpositions and the organization of shade and light. Forêts, Quartiers d’Hiver, Feuillées, Jungles, LHerbier du Seul  appear as blazons of Nature and Garden, which along with the Vanités and Memento mori seek to situate a presence in the natural disorder of the world. Followed by the series of La Bibliothèque d’Urcée, the luminous Brisées, where gleaming colors scan over the different stages of the imaginary Route de la Soie, continued by Viornes & Lichens  and  Ramures & Diurnales, still in progress : a work which is thus constructed like a diary, inscribing in the lining up of gestures as well as in the saturation of space the will to give an architecture, a design, a writing, or  maybe even a music, to the muddle of the world.

J.C.R.