" I really tried to figure out how within a sign and without using conventions, I could express something without using illustration either. "
In 1941, when he was only 21 years old, Olivier Debré met Pablo Picasso, an encounter that would prove decisive in his career as an artist. Abandoning figurative elements in favor of abstract flat colors with enigmatic titles, the painter focuses his work on colors, textures and shapes in order to transcribe his feelings on canvas. He is often compared to the movement of lyrical abstraction, close to artists like Pierre Soulages or Hans Hartung. According to the artist, his painting is not abstract, because the forms he represents are only the fruit of his personal vision of the landscape. He speaks then of sign-landscape, his emotional perception taking precedence over reality. Olivier Debré translates « the emotion that is in him before the landscape, but not the landscape », he names it fervent abstraction.