Claude Manoukian (1936) - Promenade en campagne

Claude Manoukian (1936- ) - Stroll in the Countryside

Lithograph on Japanese paper measuring 37.5 x 53 cm. The work is numbered and signed in pencil by the artist.

Piece in good condition, never framed. Ink mark (bottom part).

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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 a painting of exceptional quality. It happens like a lightning strike, or like the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. One can also say, more modestly, that it happens like Van Gogh’s transformation, from a modest draftsman to a genius of art. Claude MANOUKIAN has just crossed this exceptional threshold that leads him from being a good painter to an artist whose work bears his own distinctive marks. Surely, already his paintings bore his imprint, through the use of colors that signed his author. Like Odilon Redon, Claude MANOUKIAN knows how to pair tones that, if mishandled, would become dissonant, whereas by him they merely magnify their brilliance. But now, leaving behind rigid figuration, Claude MANOUKIAN breaks down and reconstitutes forms, and integrates into his work an additional dimension. It is with audacity, yet with the technician’s certainty, that he interprets contours, nesting them within one another. Starting from a path that Picasso has explored too superficially at times, Claude MANOUKIAN will introduce another type of forms, a new poem under his brush. As different as Racine, Corneille, or Victor Hugo may be from Verlaine or Rimbaud, though all write in verse, Claude MANOUKIAN will flirt with other painting modes, drawing from them new expressions. Exaltation of colors, soaring beyond reality into the memory of the painting, yet not enslaved by it, he composes for art and through art, using reality only as a support, as a primitive state that he evolves. 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 mood, then inscribes it on his canvas. Just as a newborn is never entirely like either parent, this canvas he paints will find its source at the bottom of one of its elements, which may sometimes dominate, certainly, but will always remain, to some extent, under the influence of the other. Each canvas will be the path toward the realization of a whole and the expression of an aesthetics that differentiates each work while preserving a common sense that we call style." Christian GERMAK