Pointillist Painting
"The Road Beneath the Snow (Le Chemin Sous la Neige)"
Eugène Bégarat (French, 1943)
Oil on canvas
15 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches
Saturated with winter's light glinting off the snow making sparkling jewels from the refracting sunshine.
Eugène Bégarat was born in 1943. At the age of seventeen, Bégarat entered the School of Decorative Arts in his hometown of Nice. In 1964, he moved to the capital of Paris where he continued his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Passionate about color and light, Bégarat is part of the great classic trend in contemporary art. He is inspired by the technical advances of the post-impressionists to build a personal touch that renews and modernizes pointillism and chromatic divisionism.
Early in his career, in 1964, Bégarat moved to Brittany to soak up the lights that inspired Felix Vallotton and the Nabis. He then went in search of stronger colored contrasts and traveled to southern Europe, and Mediterranean Africa (Spain, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia) where his style consolidates and refines from the contact with the vibrant. effervescent lights of the Mediterranean South.
He returned to settle in France, first in Paris and then permanently in 1993 in Provence, near Vence where he built an outdoor workshop/garden. There he installed his models adorned with brilliant fabrics. He thus perfects a work in which the horizon gradually disappears in favor of frames of foliage and natural elements sculpted by light. He thus begins to explore and to attempt his definition of the infinite variations of women and their garments, where the radiance of a complexion, the shine of the hair is underlined by the colored satins and the shimmering silks that he likes to use.
His canvases are vibrant and in constant motion, thanks to the opposition of primary colors: red-blue-yellow and binary: green-orange-violet. Post-impressionist painter in the line of Seurat and Signac. He also likes working with bold areas of luminous colors, more reminiscent of the work of Paul Gaugin.
Over time, his touch abandons the unique recourse to divisionism to integrate more and more colored areas. Eugène Bégarat has never been concerned with the quarrels and fashions that mark contemporary art.
Indifferent to the critical condemnations that have so disturbed the figurative artists of the twentieth century, Bégarat builds a solid and coherent work around light and color, in order to sculpt pictures of his vision of sublimated femininity, both eternal and subtly contemporary. Eugène Bégarat has an international reputation and regularly exhibited with great success both in France and abroad: Switzerland, United States, Italy, Lebanon, United Kingdom, etc. …
His works are present in major international collections.
E. Bénézit, DICTIONNAIRE DES PEINTRES, SCULPTEURS, DESSINATEURS ET GRAVEURS.