Prize winner : Orthon Friez Prize, member : Salon d’automne/ salon des indépendants. Permanent exhibition: The Boler Gallery, Paris. Works in museums in Canada. Exhibitions: Lucerne, Switzerland, England. Guest of honor (Tonnerre de Brest).
"Born in a Parisian suburb considered difficult, I rarely go to school and as I draw pretty well, my dad enrolls me for Art School by special dispensation and also due to my portfolio.
I am admitted for evening classes where I draw plaster casts throughout the year. At the end of this year I am first in the class and I move up a year.
I now finish with the plaster and move on to nude models and really get into painting; this for a boy of ten years old can seem exceptional.
I sit my school diploma at the age of thirteen. As soon as I have finished I start work in a factory where cement beams are made, I am happy to bring home a little money. Then, my parents ask me to learn a trade. I take lessons in painting and decorating enabling me to learn the preparatory techniques for canvasses.
After three years work, I easily pass my exam. I work for different companies but painting is my life. I start at Fernand Léger's workshop and as I am the son of a factory worker, he accepts to take me on as an apprentice despite my young age.
In order to pay for my studies and live, I do some decorating jobs and thanks to the people I meet at Léger’s workshop, I work on some important jobs for famous people like Jacques Brel, Barbara (who’s portrait I did) Ludmilla Tchérina (danceuse étoile), I painted her apartment and she signed some of my sculptures. Also, Léo Ferré, Agnès Capri and several others. I spend my time with the Americans and a few French and they are all a lot older than me. My life changes dramatically and I meet interesting, captivating and cultured people.
At this moment in my life I go out all the time to first performances (theatre, dance....) where I met Noureïev. At the Comédie-Française I met Jean Le Poulain and several other members: the majority of these people I met bought my paintings.
You have to imagine meeting a painter whose principal source of culture is his own instinct! Inspired by the modernity of great minds: Aragon, Duchamp, Breton, Prévert, Cocteau, Sartre, Bunuel (the film projection, The Andalusian Dog took place in Léger’s workshop) Rousseaux describes the film as a discovery: “I was shocked, overwhelmed; this really made me think about religion and the meaning of life. The film reminds me at every opportunity that freedom and provocation are linked.
The provocation is serious and must be taken seriously.
The sense of provocation is what is the most appreciable.
With Breton and the surrealist movement, painting takes on another dimension, it becomes serious!!
I followed Léger for a time and he opened doors for me. I headed in a direction that I didn’t yet know but I had a truth to find”.
He said to me “The world belongs to artists because they take hold of it and do something with it.”
The works of Rousseaux have a rare presence, they make us think. Powerful and serious painting in the spirit of the Italian Quattro cento: mysterious, full of a spiritual fervor. We have the feeling of penetrating to the heart of an unknown secret
"Rousseaux is an absolutely talented painter who through a chromatic orgasm has an immodest way of revealing himself to the world. His red period frees an incredible strength; we are at the heart of the emotion, that which offers happiness. We sense a perfume of eternity. In this work, we must be able to live a whole life in the company of one of Rousseaux’s painting and always find pleasure in it."
Jean Claude Buisson Workshop, Pont-Aven
« After two serious heart operations (due to inhaling toxic fumes whilst working in a factory from the age of thirteen), his health is restored by plumbing works performed by the virtuosos of surgery. He experiences an obsession with death, the fragility of the heart and finally the colour red - blood, life! Red regularly resurfaces as a means of expression in his work.
Striped with fragility and brownish white forays to feel better the beatings of this life machine. Art and life are contradictory: matter and mind, physical and spiritual, time and infinity. This post operation revival offers him a new found enthusiasm and a particular faith in infinite beauty, a creative outburst, a sort of inspiration from an unknown source which seems to work randomly and only represents the exterior of things!
Following a necessary path and dictated by a higher thought, allowing the passage from a state of wakefulness to deep sleep, to a dream state with the possibility of diving into the gulf of timeless knowledge!
Rousseaux has a reality to attain, that which he conceives.
There exists at the same moment in time what everybody sees and what each individual imagines!!!
We are spurred on despite ourselves by a picture awareness and we are impregnated by the colour without consciously defining it as such! It is a complete presence, gentle and violent, a poetic energy. The painting lives its own life. The radiance penetrates the individual without him being aware of the power which implodes in his body; a path towards the sensitivity of life across the mountains of spirituality, giving a sense to the imagination and ones own freedom. »
M. DE SARCE .
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rue du Général de Gaulle - 29930 Pont Aven
06 63 82 77 97 - atelierrousseaux@laposte.net
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