About the artist:

Paul Rebeyrolle (born November 3, 1926 in Eymoutiers; died February 7, 2005 in Côte-d'Or) was a French painter. As a child he had tuberculosis of the bone, which caused for long periods of immobility. Later he studied in Limoges and joined the French Communist Party. He ultimately broke with the party because of events related to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. His art is often concerned with landscapes, but is marked by violence and rage. He received praise from François Pinault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. Paul Rebeyrolle endlessly asked questions of the place of man in society and also of the place of man in nature. For Paul Rebeyrolle was a lover of the earth from which he was moulded, of the nature with which he maintained a privileged, physical, sensual and nourishing relationship, which he learned to observe as he observed humanity. All through his life, between two series, he felt the need, as if to take a breath between two combats, to calm down for a moment, to paint rivers, trees, fish, wild boars, dogs, cows, lizards. He preferred the solitude of the forest to the deafening noise of the town, the silence of his workshop to the noise of words. Unflagging worker, he experimented unceasingly, drawing from his materials, in a unique and often surprising manner, the weapons with which to reply to the violence of the subject. Inert, they take life, a life that explodes, well beyond the frame: wood, earth, stone, scrap iron, electric wire, iron wire, hessian, hair, horse hair, feathers, birds took part in this birth. Mixed together by the paint, they became paint. His mastery of the technique and of composition drove him to be ever-more demanding, the desire to be as accurate as possible, to represent without distortion. The works of Paul Rebeyrolle constitute a manifesto that once again uses a path that has been little used in the history of painting, that of Goya, Géricault, Courbet, who he admired. A steep and rough path, the one of combat against the blindness of men. The path of a committed painter, witness and critic of his time.