Maurice ESTEVE (1904 - 2001)

Hirantelle, 1981 Oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left, countersigned, titled and dated on reverse. Bears the archive numbers 8489 and P109 on a label from the gallery Louis Carré & Co. 73 x 92 cm - 28 47 / 64 x 36 7 / 32 in MAURICE ESTÈVE Hirantelle Maurice Estève (1904-2001) was a French colourist painter with a particular style who belonged to the New School of Paris. His childhood in the province of Berry rooted the aspiring artist in the land of the countryside, and imbued him with a mindset of peasant wisdom and simplicity. At the age of nine, he went to Paris and visited the Louvre. The revelation of this visit led him to start painting at the age of eleven. His father strongly opposed his artistic aspirations, but Estève persisted and moved to Paris to follow his vocation. He attended evening classes at a Paris school and then enrolled at the Colarossi Academy where he studied the old masters and was mainly interested in the Primitives. From 1929 onwards, the lesson of Cézanne came into play, as well as the one of Matisse and the cubist syntax of Fernand Léger: Maurice Estève gradually detached himself from figuration. Sinuous bands of bright, primary colours began to cover his paintings. In 1937 he assisted Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the pioneers of the Orphist movement (1913), who sought to emphasise colour and light by seeking the simultaneity of elements. It is an orchestration of colours and in particular of fundamental tones that will be at work in Maurice Estève’s painting throughout his life. With maturity, he reached a growing freedom and in the 1980s began to mix geometric forms with curves in an approach that was increasingly harmonious and close to nature. Hirantelle, painted in 1981, is part of his aesthetic research at the time. Maurice Estève paints directly on the canvas without any prior drawing or preconceived image: he lets the shapes and colours come to him. "Hirantelle" seems to be an invented word. Indeed, the artist uses neologisms (seeking visual and sound associations), localities and slang to illustrate with inventiveness his paintings which are doors to dreams. The singularity of Estève’s work compared to that of the abstract painters of his generation is that his slow journey through the figurative, far from having led him to a progressive reduction of his vocabulary, was instead charged with all the richness discovered along the way. The artist’s dazzling palette is at work in Hirantelle, and the harmony that emerges is due to the organic aspect of his paintings and his deep connection with nature. "What brings me to life, more than a plastic translation of the appearances of the visible world, is the desire to see appearing under my working hand a relationship with what the so-called reality hides. A difficult undertaking. How to give form and light to what has not been seen? Only a stubborn work that successively refuses the proposals of my imagination allows me to approach the vision that I hope is essential. The blind and the painters see at night". Estève, Maurice, François Collaborateur Chapon, et Galerie Louis Carré & Cie. Estève : peintures récentes. Paris, France : Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, 1990, p.20.