His canvases made of superimpositions and juxtapositions are part of a form of French, satirical and virulent pop art known as narrative figuration. The artist died on Monday, November 29, at the age of 90.
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The French painter Bernard Rancillac died in Malakoff (Hauts-de-Seine), Monday, November 29, at the age of 90. His work is one of the most characteristic of the current of narrative figuration, in its most political form. Born in Paris on August 29, 1931, he spends his first years in Algeria, then stays during the war in his paternal family in Yssingeaux (Haute-Loire), where he is a student in a religious college. Back in Paris in 1945, he prepares the drawing monitor, then accomplishes his military service in Morocco, coming back in 1955 and begins to paint in a workshop in Bourg-la-Reine (Hauts-de-Seine) while being a teacher. to live. After a first gallery exhibition in 1956, he regularly shows himself at the young painting show and the new realities. A contract with a collector allows him to leave the teaching in 1959.
In 1961, he obtained the price of painting at the biennial of Paris. In this first period, it emerges from the reigning pictorial modes, by introducing on the web incongruous allusions, ghostly in an abstraction in the manner of arshile gorky or the bribes of comics in what would be, without these intrusions, phattiches of Willem Kooning. These figurative signs soon become the main protagonists of canvas named the return of Mickey or appearance of the Virgin to cartoon characters. They date from 1964, a capital year for him because it is the one where he organizes, with the painters Hervé Telemaque and Peter Foldès and the review Gérald Gérald Gérald Talabot, the exhibition “daily mythologies” at the museum of modern art of the city from Paris. It launches the notion of narrative figuration, later became a historic mark: the name of a form of satirical and virulent French pop art.
Walt Disney’s images are soon replaced by faces and women’s corps taken advertising, photoreportage fragments, advertising logos. Using an episcope, it proceeds by juxtapositions and superimpositions of these elements, enlarged in the format of the canvas and colored warmly. From this editing technique, in the second half of the 1960s, works which denounce the American intervention in Vietnam, the misery of underdeveloped countries, the persistence of the colonial mentality in France or apartheid in South Africa . This commitment led him to participate in the exhibition “Le Monde in question” in 1966, at the May of Havana the following year and the Fine Arts Workshop in May 1968. He realizes the Poster in the effigy of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, we are all Jews and Germans, remained famous.
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