Claude Manoukian (1936) - Campagne

Claude Manoukian (1936- ) - Campaign

Lithography on vellum paper measuring 50 x 65 cm.
The work is E.A (Artist's Proof) and signed in pencil by the artist.

Work in good condition, never been framed.

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The numbering may differ from the photos.

Claude MANOUKIAN is a painter born in 1936. "There are turning points in a painter's life that are hard to explain, except that suddenly a good painting becomes an exceptional painting. It happens like a bolt of lightning, or like the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. One can also say, more modestly, that it happens like the transformation of Van Gogh who, from a modest draftsman, became a genius of art. Claude MANOUKIAN has just taken this exceptional step that leads him from a good painter that he was to an artist whose work bears marks that are his own. Indeed, already his paintings bore his imprint, through the use of colors that signed their author. Like Odilon Redon, Claude MANOUKIAN knows very well how to marry tones that, if misused, would become dissonant, whereas by him they merely magnify their brilliance. But now, leaving rigorous figuration, Claude MANOUKIAN decomposes and recomposes forms, and incorporates into his work an additional dimension. It is with audacity, but with the technician's certainty, that he interprets the contours, interlocks them with one another. It is starting from a line of exploration that Picasso, too superficially pursued, did not fully develop, that Claude MANOUKIAN will introduce another type of forms, becoming a new poem under his brush. As different as Racine, Corneille or Victor Hugo can be from Verlaine or Rimbaud, though all write in verse, Claude MANOUKIAN will flirt with other modes of painting, and will derive from them new expressions. Exaltation of colors, soaring beyond reality that he integrates into the memory of the painting, but not as its slave, he composes for art and by art, using reality only as a support, as a primitive state that he makes evolve. The gaze of what he sees is only the reflection of becoming. He uses his memory as a guiding thread, but within himself he composes his child born of the senses of sight and of mood, and then inscribes it on his canvas. Like a newborn, it is never entirely like either parent; this canvas he paints will find its source deep in one of its elements, which may sometimes dominate, certainly, but will always remain in part under the influence of the other. Each canvas will be the path toward the fulfillment of a whole and the expression of an aesthetics that differentiates each work while preserving a common sense that we call style." Christian GERMAK