In the family of painters, Roger Charoux, Evan Sohun and Gaël Froget are, each in their own way, the quiet ones, preferring to let their work speak for itself. But when they’re together… they become almost voluble. For the Audace exhibition, which this pictorial trio presented at Imaaya at the end of May, the “vernissage” took place in the intimacy of the studio of the doyen of Mauritian painting…
Dominique Bellier
At 93, even if his body is slower, Roger Charoux retains his intellectual freshness and natural elegance. A painter and interior designer, he has a keen eye for the aesthetics of places and the people who live in them… Stepping through the gate into his garden is already an enchantment. “Roger is a Pandora’s box! He thinks visually about everything he does…” exclaims Evan Sohun. The painter opened the doors of his studio just before the exhibition at Galerie Imaaya, in the company of Gaël Froget and Evan Sohun, who brought along some of his paintings.
Roger’s figurative and deconstructed landscapes, nudes and still lifes make up half of the exhibition, winking at Gaël’s “Basque” postcards and “graphic” portraits, as well as Evan’s highly structured and graphic spaces, architectural in short, in a palette of bright, vivid colors that harmonize with those of his elder brother.
Renewal and echo
The theme of audacity has emerged as the adrenaline that drives these artists to regularly reinterpret their expression. Over the last fifteen years or so, Roger Charoux has moved towards increasingly abstract works, which magnify color and simplify forms, in the manner of a Chazal, but with motifs and intentions all his own. The audacity of colors that arouse the emotions, the perpetual quest for renewal and the pleasure of breaking out of one’s comfort zone: all this unites them and resembles them!
The two younger artists tell how they adopted certain motifs or black as a background – rather than an outline – under Roger’s influence: “Malcolm used to say that you have to paint on the night.” Black exalts the colors in several of the paintings. While Evan has worked particularly on the theme of interior/exterior relationships, the motif of the window opening onto an elsewhere recurs as much in his creations as in those of Gaël Froget, who offers a series of abstract landscapes, entitled Eskapad, on the revenge of nature under confinement.
Laurie Castel in June…
Watercolorist and hiker Laurie Castel is capable of placing her fine representations on supports as unexpected as a cigarette butt from a hike! From June 1, she will be exhibiting her new work at Imaaya, in which she integrates materials found in nature. Glued to paper, incongruous bits of sole contrast with the subtlety of the drawing, crushing the landscape and bearing witness to the times…
