Gérard Schlosser
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
«In 1953, I attended the creation of Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre Babylone. There was a Giacometti tree on stage. An actor took out a radish from his pocket. It’s a close-up shot, you see. Telling stories with close-ups… that’s what produced this: I have to start painting.’
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
Gérard Schlosser was born on June 12, 1931 in Lille. He lives and works in Paris and in the Drôme region. Trained at the École des Arts Appliqués in Paris between 1948 and 1951, he studied goldsmithing there. In parallel, he studied sculpture autodidactically and then briefly attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
In 1953, he chose to devote himself permanently to painting. His choice focused directly on Figuration Narrative: he began painting fragments of bodies flattened and blacked out. His works also recall the research of Pop Art artists.
Starting in 1970, Gérard Schlosser adopted and systematized the process of photography, as did some French artists associated with Surrealism or the Figuration Narrative, such as Jacques Monory, Bernard Rancillac, and Gérard Fromanger. Thus, he used an episcope to project an image onto the surface of the canvas. He also practiced the technique of photomontage, which, for him, consists of associating, through cutting, two or three elements drawn from different documents. Alain Jouffroy wrote about him: «Schlosser is a camera-eye, the camera-eye of a painter-cinematographer, and not just an eye. But this camera-eye — and this eye — are, like those of a filmmaker, inextricably linked to the demands of time, the demands of the spaces of a society.»
Through his canvases and series (elongated female bodies, landscapes and nocturnal views), Gérard Schlosser seeks to «tell stories with close-ups». He paints the details that catch the eye, the revealing details that tell a story. Due to the framing of his works, the characters he depicts never appear in their entirety, as if they were revealed only partially, which leaves the viewer free to speculate on the dreamlike implications.
