Gérard Titus-Carmel

The work

Strokes – On the Silk Road, XII
2009
Acrylic on canvas
175 x 175 cm

Titus-Carmel’s work is poetic and hermetic. It belongs to him but is intended for the viewer. The series Brisée), in which colour shines, toning the stages of an imaginary Silk Road, is a work-in-progress that builds like a diary which, in both the alignment of gestures and the saturation of space, conceals the intention to endow it with architecture or drawing—and, even beyond the languages of writing and music, the disorder of the world.

ince the early 1970s, his work has been organized into groups and series, each dated and concluded with a title. Linked together, they compose a long narrative of loss, taken to the extreme of emptiness and absence. The Woods (Forêts), the Winter Quarters (Quartiers d’hiver), the Feuillées, the Jungles, and the Herbarium (Herbier du seul) are presented here as emblems of nature and the garden, which, along with the Vanities (Vanités) and the Memento mori, they claim to represent. These series are followed by the Urcée Library cycle (Bibliothèque d’Urcée), which, in turn, leads to the luminous Strokes (Brisées), in which color shines, intoning the stages of an imaginary Silk Road.
These are followed by long sequences ranging from drawings on the figure of dislocation and rupture, of deconstruction and union, directed toward the center of a body of work that intertwines conceptual investigations and graphic concerns, to the most recent series of drawings and paintings on the space of landscape, shadow, and light.

The artist

(Paris, 1942)

Born in Paris on October 10, 1942, Gérard Titus-Carmel lives and works in Oulchy-le-Château, Picardy. From 1958 to 1962, he studied at the engraving and goldsmithing workshop at the École Boulle in Paris and has since devoted himself exclusively to painting, drawing, engraving, and writing. His first exhibition took place at the Paris Biennale in 1963, and he has since held nearly 300 solo exhibitions, both in France and abroad, where his work is included in the collections of 100 museums and public institutions. Titus-Carmel has officially represented France at numerous international events and has produced several monumental paintings, including those for the Grand Hall of the Ministry of Finance in Paris (1989), the Cité des Congres in Nantes (1990), and the Espace Olivier Messiaen at the DRAC Champagne-Ardenne9 in Chalon. As a writer, he has published around fifty works, poetry collections, and essays on art and literature. François-Marie Deyrolle’s L’Atelier Contemporain published his complete collection of texts on painting in 2016.