Artist
Contribution
Notice
APPIEN
Born into a farming family, Georges Constant (known as Appien) was a self-educated painter. His meeting with the painter Jacques Chapiro was decisive, opening him up to abstraction. The transition from figurative-color to abstract-black and white initiated in 1966 has never been interrupted.
“My approach is very personal, inward, without complacency or prostitution, without any detours, like a natural necessity. My painting seeks only one dimension, no depth: the quest for the simplest expression in which I have no desire to please myself or others. I know where I’m going, on those paths that lead to the simple, to emptiness, to disincarnation. I’ve learned that Man owns nothing! From laughter to mourning, from satisfaction to disillusionment, the artist needs to isolate himself, to withdraw into himself. Having overcome all attraction to color, for a minimalist monochrome painting, my work ends up in a silent relationship of black and white, with sometimes an appearance of color! But now I’ve come to ask myself: what’s next? I know there will always be a blank canvas on my easel. Text taken from “Peintres autour du Ventoux”, Jean-Paul Chabaud.
Source / Translated from: Ville de Carpentras
BS12 – January/May 1984
pp.7-13
APPIEN
Travail sur papier scellé
7 A4 sheets – 21 x 29.7 cm. Ink drawings.