À flanc de lumière II (n°119), 1967
Oil on canvas, signed lower right.
97 x 130 cm
Provenance :
From the family estate
ON A SLOPE OF LIGHT
Traveling with his grandfather to Aix-en-Provence in 1949, François Aubrun discovered a new landscape, very different from his native Hauts-de-Seine. He would later settle at the foot of the Sainte Victoire, in the small village of Le Tholonet, already home to André Masson. As a young man, Aubrun had studied with Jean Souverbie at the Académie de la Section d'or in Paris, and with Paul Niclausse in sculpture in the early 1950s. He then entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His discovery of the Aix-en-Provence landscape, which Cézanne had already carefully observed, was a revelation that led him to explore all the dimensions of light, transparency and matter. An intense poetry emerges. In Aubrun's paintings, the physical elements of the landscape (the river, the mist) find a plastic path (liquidity, fluidity) that leads to a more conceptual idea (the feminine). Overcoming form to focus on color and matter, Aubrun does not consider himself an abstract painter. Working as closely as possible to nature, he seeks to concentrate its forces and essence in his canvases, an approach reminiscent of the fundamentals of Asian painting.
Over the course of his career, his chromatic palette faded to white, black and gray. Towards the end of the artist's life, his research focused more particularly on black, which he deployed in all its hues, seeking in the superimposition of layers of material, in the brushstrokes, the emergence of light and that transparency which were the guiding threads of his plastic work. Aubrun divided his time between creation and teaching, first as professor of painting at the University of Marseille (Luminy site), then at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. He was appointed director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Toulon, which he ran from 1974 to 1980, and then taught at the Beaux-Arts de Paris until 1992. He regularly exhibited his work in France and abroad. "The act of painting takes place alone, and you must never suffer from solitude if you want to paint. Painting is not a profession, it's a path that can only be followed in solitude. François Aubrun's artistic journey is intimately linked to the place where he chose to set up his studio, the Domaine Saint-Joseph. A spiritual place, a retreat in the heart of nature and a commanding viewpoint over the Sainte-Victoire mountain range, which, for the painters who would later observe it, taught them the lesson of Cézanne...