Les Terres Brûlées (2023) Painting by Gérard Stricher

A man possessed, Gérard Stricher starts out with elemental outlines, telluric lines of force and prodigious flows of mental lava. Then throws away the key to the codes. Van Gogh, CoBrA and the archaic powers of forgotten countries are summoned up. Brief life and insane health: between the two a fiery art triggers our affective landscape. Close-up on the originary upsurges. The old world has to be remade. Real life is already always there.

Part invisible figuration, part embodied abstraction, extreme tensions driving creative chaos offer sovereign incantations of space. Singularly plastic structures emerge. And landscapes of immensity took horizons into the far distance. Multiple exploded forms traversed by all the world's dips and bumps. Working at his primal earth-matter from within, Stricher rips the picture surface. A fiery, untamed notation of disfigurement in the salutary no man's land of precluded meaning. Shredded space of a ceaselessly hacked art. Stricher's devastated landscapes are arrested blinding insights. The fever of the deeps pervades these explosive chromatics and visionary upheavals. Frenetic pre- world landscapes bare of all cultural landmarks sabotage the inertia of reality and take root in the throes of desire. A strange sacrificial energy. In this art of brawling and battling the sources of the picture surface exult. The veins of the earth's deep blood are its pathways to the universe. 

An earth-dweller to be reckoned with, Stricher comes on with a luminously barbarous art, one exulting in a primal well-being suffused with the devouring immensity of life and barely tamed magma. He tests out the solar vigour of those vital transgressions that sweep away our lives and our voids. His painting plots a course between stark chromatic planes and unyielding structural signs, between the breathing of buried flesh and a labyrinth of unsparing signs, between stylistic monumentality and the shamanically "charged". Here and there, though, are tiny, delicate touches imbued with infinite sensitivity. Here and there Gérard Stricher releases masses of psychic oxygen into a space spattered with carnal profundities.

• Nationality:
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains: Represented by a Gallery,
• Groups: Artists presented by a gallery