GILBERT PASTOR 1932/2015

OIL ON CANVAS 60X73CM

Melodious ochres, tellurian browns, burnt earths: for him, painting is what springs from the unconscious, what reveals the interiorite, what reveals us to ourselves. His Proustian way of resurrecting the past is a supremely elegant way of showing how the most fragile fabric of our existence - that of fleeting sensations, unacknowledged wounds and unspoken secrets - is always sewn together with the threads of history.
His works are contaminated by an unfathomable discretion, even a certain withdrawal, that of finesse. The sunshine of Provence, Gilbert Pastor's birthplace, is obscured beneath his obscure, but not without delicacy.

Parisian poets and artists living in the south of France would not hesitate to cross the distance to meet Gilbert Pastor. His friendship with the poet Boris Bojnev encouraged his lyrical vocation. "Boris Bojnev gave me self-confidence and a taste for reading, especially poetry, which he loved and introduced into his painting," confided Gilbert Pastor.

The painter depicts a mass of sensations. His brushstrokes merge into warm, blurred ochre tones. The hues of his palette, mainly autumnal, continue until the dawn of spring. A devotee of purity, his creations emanate a bewitching atmosphere that invites pure, simple contemplation, in the image of the artist's humility. His brush seems rooted in the earth, just as he himself is rooted in a simple world of human interiority.

As curator Pierre Gaudibert rightly points out: "Pastor's paintings exude an atmosphere that is both poignant and unsettling, a mixture of childhood burials, adolescent obsessions and lifelong dreams, combining acute eroticism with secret modesty.

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