Serge LABEGORRE
Habiter le regard
June 4th – July 17th 2022
Radiation and inner spirituality: two conditions for inhabiting space
All authentic painting is of the order of spirituality. My first vocation was to paint portraits and I naturally drank from the Christian sources of the art of portraiture, then I followed its long and magnificent history to this day.
From the intimate portrait, we have moved on to characters and large formats whose silhouettes need space and a solid scaffolding to impose themselves.
I indeed believe in monumentality, in power also with its brutality. To do this, we must nourish ourselves with rigorous realism, a concern for truth, respect for particularities and what they suggest. It is the aesthetic flesh of a work, and under this skin there is a soul: a multiple soul, that of the painter, the model and the viewer.
Serge Labégorre
“I will always remember the creative force of my first experience as a painter when something of a poetic order entered my consciousness, the day when it appeared to me that in a gesture I could invite all the forces of the universe , where I realized that the world was a theater that my own body, my own heart had to inhabit.”
S. Labégorre
Discours du vernissage,
Exposition au Carnel de Libourne
5 juin 2015
“The painted faces of Labégorre are convulsive and chaotic, hard and terrible, but prouder and livelier than the darkness that gave birth to them. They are figures at the height of the universe; fabulous effigies of the fragile human can, whose carnal light illuminates the gutted black of the void”
Christian NOORBERGEN