ROBERT DROULERS 1920/1994

OIL ON CANVAS FROM 1962. "LAMBERSART"..38x46cm RARE...THE PAINTER BENEFITTED FROM TWO RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITIONS IN 2023 AT MUSSE ESTRINE AND AT LA PISCINE IN ROUBAIX.

A self-taught artist born in Lille in 1920, from a bourgeois background, Robert Droulers painted from his adolescence, first on the subject in the Lille region and in Belgium, then, from the 1950s, more in the studio.
Moving towards abstract painting, Droulers exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and frequented the artists that posterity will bring together under the name Groupe de Roubaix, but also the members of the Atelier de la Monnaie in Lille. Eugène Leroy becomes a friend and loyal supporter. Living in Lambersart with his family from 1954 to 1964, Robert Droulers was employed as an executive in the family textile business. Working during the day, he devoted his nights to painting, exploring expressionism, cubism and orphism, and exhibited in galleries in Lille, Brussels and Roubaix.
Following an expropriation of the land, Droulers ceased his activity as a textile industrialist in 1964 and permanently left the North for Provence where the radically new light and the association with several poets profoundly modified his art. The house that he bought and restored in Murs and for which he designed furniture constitutes his new work. From 1973 to 1980, Droulers lived in Aix-en-Provence before leaving for Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
The Estrine and La Piscine museums are joining forces to produce a major exhibition in two concurrent sections exploring the diversity of mediums approached by this versatile artist: drawings (inks, watercolors, gouaches) but also collages and prints (monotypes, linocuts, points dry), paintings (on wood or canvas) but also works in volume (sculptures, textiles, furniture, architecture).
This is how the deliberately indecisive, light and dancing journey is retraced, imbued with obstinacy as well as fantasy, and guided by a form of spirituality, of a man of paradoxes. From the subtle and moving lights of the skies of the native North, to the dazzling and blinding whiteness of the adopted South-East. From early works, marked by Goya, El Greco, Flemish expressionism and the formal experiments of the second School of Paris, to those of maturity, inspired by Italian masters. From the often dense and dark materials of the Lambersart period (our painting) to the more fluid and refined materials of the Provencal period, in search of transparency and evanescence, to the point of luminous dazzling.
“Robert Droulers is a painter who seeks to capture the dreamed or lived vision, but at the same time, he is the one who is concerned with letting living things happen. No wonder one of his favorite figures is the window.
A man of “air and wind”, singer of the unfinished, he knows himself to be an angel of the double kingdom. In our midst, loving us and magnetizing us, so to speak, without our knowledge, he has opened a path which has the gift of constantly introducing the infinite into the finite, the invisible into the visible, the desire for beauty into death transfigured by the flame lit in the most secret corner of the heart. »
François Cheng

Ref: 6DIBT5HY2Z