When culture rhymes with painting

His unique art intrigues as much as it fascinates. Meeting with an outstanding local artist, whose works have travelled the world.

How long have you been painting?

I've always drawn. I was drawing before I could even walk. At the age of two, my mother could leave me alone at home with pencils. I made my first small painting (8 x 8 cm), and my first comic strip during the evacuation in 1939 in Haute-Vienne around the age of four or five.

At what point did you decide to make it your profession?

When I left primary school at 14, I wanted to become a painter. My parents were convinced you couldn’t make a living with painting! An uncle encouraged me and introduced me to the director of the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, currently the HEAR (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin). I was allowed to sit the competitive examination in spite of my young age and was among the first to be selected. However, in order to be admitted, the legal age at the time was 21 years old. So I was declared emancipated at the age of 14. I graduated at the top of my class at the age of 19, and won the first prize of the City of Strasbourg.

Your works have crossed borders, where have you exhibited them before?

I exhibited my work for the first time in 1954 in Sessenheim. Then later in Germany in a small gallery where a first work was purchased by the Curator of the Stuttgart Museum. From then on, exhibitions followed one after the other throughout Europe, in the United States or in Hong Kong... My works can be found in many museums and public collections (Senate in Paris, Sammlung Ludwig, Stuttgart Museum, Land Baden-Württemberg, Departmental Council of the Lower Rhine, United States, Moscow, to name but a few). I have made several structural works. One of them, "Le Jardin des Délices", from the Hortus Deliciarum (Editions La Diane Française-Nice) entered the Library of Alexandria 

We know you paint in the dark and with tools made by you. Do you have any other secrets to reveal to us?

Indeed, I paint by candlelight to better dissociate the eye and the hand. I created my own tools for painting. These tools that I am the only one to use have allowed me to develop an original technique and thus a new type of painting. I also make my paintings with pigments that are often rare and pure, which give my works their power and luminosity.

Is that how you developed your famous Paso Blue?

Yes absolutely! Paso blue is an intense and deep colour, the result of many years of research. I use a pure and exceptional pigment. My "alchemy" allows me to keep all the superb and visual power of blue. Paso blue draws people towards the infinite... It is present in almost all my works and is omnipresent with touches of Gold in the last exhibition "Paso and Rhine Gold".

What place does the Rhine occupy in your works?

I was born in Drusenheim on the banks of the Rhine, a mythical river, a melting pot of culture, religion and trade. I have been inhabited since my childhood by the breath of the Rhine. In 2018, through a Rhine Gold exhibition at the Paso museum, I celebrated the beauty of the Rhine and paid tribute to the artists, poets, writers, humanists, philosophers, theologians... whose imagination has always been nourished by this majestic river. The Rhine is also the backbone of Europe, the theatre and witness to the turbulence of history and the reconciliation of peoples.

What are your next artistic projects?

I have many projects underway, but I don't like to talk about them before they are completed. In addition, a new book will be published soon.

What advice would you give to a passionate beginner in art?

Above all, don’t let yourself be trapped in any kind of straitjacket, keep your own personality, be a free creator, away from the flood of preconceived ideas.

Link to the official PASO website www.paso.fr