Alain Lestié was born in Hossegor in 1944. He lives and works in Cannes. In the 1960s, Alain Lestié could be considered a painter of critical figuration, questioning the future of painting, which for many at the time seemed destined to disappear. The work he has proposed at the Depardieu gallery is a testament of the progress made by this atypical artist who expresses himself with extraordinary dexterity using only the Nero pencil and Fabriano sheets of identical paper. An austerity of technical means that contrasts with the infinite variation of the tints going from black to white through all the shades of grey. Whatever the subject of each painting, figure, symbol or sign more or less enigmatic, one finds the radiance of the shades of grey and black, the sharpness of the drawing, the evocative power of a universe specific to the artist, revealing his great mastery of colors and shapes. Alain Lestié, a true painter of critical figuration who began to question the future of painting in the 1970s, takes us to a parallel world where the representation of objects or spaces, are metaphor of his speech on art and reality. The writings Alain Lestié published for many years, in addition to his work as a painter, are imbued with a reflection that explain the depth attached to his work. The technological world in which we are, “chiaroscuro” so well represented in his work, celebrates the growing alienation of our contemporary era. Is this the announcement of the disappearance of the world? At the same time disappearance of nature and of human artifice? Isolation and separation of beings who still move in this universe? Certainly all this, desperate not to see a new world born on the bankruptcy of the old …
