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Art is not born “ex-abrupto”, be it in the viewer’s or in the painter’s mind. The new paths explored by the painter should first follow the old ones, even when their talent and originality are capable of creating surprises and of opening up unexpected prospects. The painting lover may well have familiarized themselves with whatever the great book of the Art history has led them to know since the dawn of time. The presence of a new artwork will require them to go a step further, to consider other alternatives and make the effort to accept them.

The canvas: an empty and white space, always the same, that needs to be filled, made alive, on which a first approach must be dared, a first gesture, a first sign of possession… 
Sometimes a first spot, dark or colored, violently thrown onto the virgin surface like a sudden agreement will trigger harmonies of color and shape. Or the artist will start by hastily sketching a few thick, black lines with a charcoal, which will then allow them in some ways to settle on their territory.
Le téléphone
The painter Courtade uses different resources to take possession of this rebel space: unexpected territorial divisions which spread the objects around a huge gap e (Le téléphone)), tilting perspectives, simultaneous points of view, unanticipated delineation of bodies and objects… 
Once the general direction of the work has been defined, elaborating on the canvas may start.

The addition or deletion of volumes, the strengthening or removal of lines and the weight of light or dark spots will eventually, from correction to correction, from unbalances to balances, make the painting move towards its final structure. 

The colors play a paramount role in the final harmony of the canvas. They create a symphony that may occasionally equate with the composition, but that will more often follow it without being bound by it, like the music accompanying the dancer. The network that delineates the shapes contrasts with the more active lyricism of tonalities. The supporting lines and colored surfaces are interactive, providing a subtle play of unexpected balances. In some cases, the shades accumulate in the gulfs or bays outlined by thicker lines; in other cases they overlap the arabesque which outlines the body or the object to end up its course well beyond its limits, thus being suffused in an irregular halo of pure tonalities. Some bursts of colors, some violent smears, render surfaces dramatic in some unexpected places. The colors may even acquire total independence. 
The surface then entirely escapes the network of shapes and figures, singing a melody of its own in fully abstract canvases. 
But even in these non-figurative works, they are immediately recognizable as Courtade’s own specific colors which are as specific as the sound of his voice. The surface retains the achievement of the gesture showing the enthusiasm, the dynamism of the one who has created it. It is the secret summary of the passions, the desires and personality of the one who has laid them down there once and for all. 

A painting, whether abstract or figurative, will of course reflect the author’s intimate world and individuality. 
The feelings aroused by a painting are not yet generated only by the subject that has been represented, but also by the possibility which is offered to the viewer to feel the emotions the painter has transferred to the canvas. Preconceived ideas and the refusal of letting oneself be touched or moved, are forbidden in the creative work of another.

The painter, in particular in our days, is not innocent; they are inhabited by the imaginary museum.
They know about all the attempts of the artists who preceded them.
Thus, the nude woman in a painting by Courtade, although she is of course the image of a fleshy woman, an evocation of tenderness and sensuality, is primarily a painted naked woman. She recalls all of those who have been represented through the ages on countless frescoes or canvases up to the contemporary nudes by Modigliani, Derain or Picasso. She is recognizable by some signs: the eye, the breast, the sex, the geometrically shaped legs … It is a symbolic woman open to all interpretations, a graphic, malleable woman. Her perfectly mastered anatomy is applied in all possible geometrics. 
Her stretched, distorted body lends itself to the most unexpected shapes. Yet there must be some reason for these transformations, contortions imposed to the human figure. They will appear to be all the more necessary and acceptable that the artist will have managed to produce a synthesis of what they know of the world and what they can impose in their works. There is, in the growing of a plant, in the changes in a body or in a face, in the course of the years, natural, induced, physiological transformations of which we are intuitively aware. 
Artists must feel it, take it into account and draw their inspiration from it when they deliberately alter the beings or objects they draw. 


La grosse blonde Courtade, like most painters, seeks to make his creatures on his canvas blend together with everything else which is represented in it. When a nude is placed near a still-life, the bulges or recesses of her body will be affected by the convex or concave objects located next to her. 
In the painting entitled La grosse blonde, the woman sitting next to a bowl with lemons has been subjected to a colored contagion effect and has thereby become a kind of big acid yellow fruit. 
He likes violent and contrasted colors. 
He will place yellowy-greens with caeruleum blues and in neighboring zones complementary reds and oranges, as intense as they are skillfully matched. 
The painter is free to dictate his own laws, change the outside world to make it suit the representation of his own particular world, but first the artist, then the viewer, must deeply feel the logic and the need for those transformations. This implies that both of them share the same culture, and that they also have a common intuition of life and its laws.

Courtade is no longer…

His works are now the expression of what he has been, and the reflection of the time in which he has lived.
Courtades spirit is now intrinsically tied to his era.
The interruption of his work at a specific moment in time makes his work stuck in time, but also immortalized.


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Contact: plaindoux.peintre@free.fr design : Audrey Lefeuvre