Mes petites toiles d'ete : 'Tre' 2003

Previous exhibition : May 2003 London

Back from Mandalay 2003

My painting is abstract since it doesn't call on figuration; actually it is in between both expressions.

By colours and movement I try to :

- trigger a strong emotion, pleasant or annoying, serene or oppresive; a pictorial projection of my sensitivity to life.

- induce the oblivion of material reality so as to provoke an immersion in a personal and unique emotional world.

Visually no element should interfere with the 'imaginary'; that is why my signature is at the back of the canvas.

Every painting has a title, since it's necessary. For the painter, it's an emotional key to his state of mind when he created his work.

The spectator has to ignore the titles. His sensitivity prevails; it is through the emotion he feels that he will be able to meet the painter and his reference.

Pierre Amiel was born in Perpignan, France from a Chinese mother and a Catalonian father.

As a young man, he admired Salvador Dali, doyen of the Old Royal City of Majorca and dreamed in front of the works of Zao Wou Ki who has developed his own unique abstract and still oriental style.

At 17, having completed classes in drawing, copying old Masters and reproducing adinfinitum line drawings and watercolours in Pre Raphael style, he decided to use painting as a form of self expression.

During 1969 and 1970, he exhibited at Deauville and worked later with the group "Jeune Peinture, Jeune Expression" in Paris. From 1980-83, still working with the 'Group', his work was shown at "Le Grand Palais". Further solo exhibitions soon followed in Vernon (1984), Chartres (1984-85).

After a break of many years, Pierre started painting again while staying in London in June and July 2000, in his native town of Perpignan, he has exhibited to great acclaim at "La Galerie Serra" and at "Le Palais des Rois de Majorque"

He now travels all around the world while working and living both in Paris and London.

www.pierreamiel.com

PRESS REVIEW

June 2002 - Jacques Duplouich (Le Figaro)

Pierre Amiel: Liberating Colour

Colour is a tool for Pierre Amiel, a faithful observer of Matisse, who appreciated it as an 'instrument of liberation'. Families of blues enchant him Tthe dynasty of reds fascinates him. He is smitten with yellows. He instills in his canvasses squirts of bistre borrowed from Braque and sharp tips of ebony to provoke strong emotions. Such chromatic combinations could not be farther from pictoral zen. Such is precisely Matisse's teaching, so concerned with exploiting colour  'for its action over the feeling of the observer, as important(...) as the energetic sounding of a gong'.

Facing the universe, Pierre Amiel dives into the quick of colour; capturing the essence of things-events and beings -without make up, without blinkers, uncompromising and stubborn like a hunter on the prowl the image caught, he never lets it go. He fixes. It is there, presenting violence, burst or contained. The artist is not looking to please or swagger. A regard for gentleness and the beautiful art of luxury, utilitarian and made to measure for decorative purposes, does not cross his mind.

He is painter of thoughts, moods and impressions. Emotion is his raw material-pangs, overcome furies confronted with unpunished barbarity, hopes of rebirth, yearning, battles of the memory...

Here great fields of pure colour collide with fulgurating flashes into metamorphosed still-lives. Imaginary tumuli and invented megaliths stylise free spatial architectures, as if flung by magicians or gnomes, and enliven reality with total weightlessness and exceptional vigor. Ripping at deserted horizons, these shapes fix the figurative world in one of plastic abstraction. There is a freshness of the soul and a rigor of the retina within a rigor of the structure that are particular to Pierre Amiel, image catcher and memory arranger.

His brush tears space into shreds with a personal vehemence, a violence even. Such is his desire to seize life at its source, in its spontaneity, as it is. Scales of blue infused with black tell the same tragically bare decor of the world. Ranges of red capture his painful convulsions, his uncertainties, his dawn sufferings.

'To lay colours that render sensations', such is the abject of Pierre Amiel's work. There is often a gravity to his paintings, an austerity, at times a density, with their semblance of doomsday; always a powerful lyricism, insofar as they allow the eye to accustom itself to the mystery of the invited images.

We are brought to reality's boundaries, in an oniric kinship established as if to better fix the world's backgrounds. Pierre Amiel's work is a collection of sensations emerged from exposure to current events and to memory, of sequences barn from perceptible irradiations projected with his inner tonality into a conquering and beaming expression. The act of painting is for the painter a renewal with the moment, appeared/disappeared in colossal, subtle and cruel hints, certain that art is re-birth. it is also a continuous dissatisfaction, marking the issue of inner conflicts particular to the artist in his sensitive ties to everyday life and containing him to a certain violence. Because he is not spared either.

Far from hackneyed notions and schools, Pierre Amiel reads life day to day and paints his everyday readings. The eye and the hand obey the same passion. The painter's vocation is to reveal. To express the invisible. The unheard of. The joy of painting, heightened by a perfection of agreement between mind and brush wins approval at first glance.

Jacques Duplouich
Le Figaro