Alain Mongrenier - painter 
Mixed 90x80 Alain Mongrenier portrait of the painter Jacques
Béal 
A look at the mystery of the visible To meet him he must leave town (Amiens) and drive through the countryside until Rubempre Amiens, his adopted village. His house near the church is long ... / ... In the wake of the home, workshop. Wall posters are reminiscent of French exhibitions in galleries (in Amiens Guy Charrier, Jean-Claude Bellier to Paris), Foundations (Gulbekian in Lisbon) museums (Lecuyer Antoine Saint Quentin Museum of San Francisco). Born October 4, 1940, Alain Mongrenier has already been the subject of major retrospectives at the Abbey of Notre Dame du Gard in 1975 and the Museum of St. Riquier in 2003.
Back to the roots. At 7 years old, still imbued with the teaching of fine arts of Amiens and teen romance, Alain Mongrenier is inspired by extreme situations, poverty, disease, complaint, anxiety. He painted pictures dark, frozen, thick bill, reflecting his admiration to El Greco, Goya, Soutine and the Expressionists. Inspiration, gradually emerges from this dramatic tension akin to "cry" by Munch. He abandoned the themes miserabilist expanding its range in both colors in the grounds. Alain Mongrenier discovers the joy of a singular pictorial music, lighter.
The displacement of lines creates the movement. The live drawing color. He paints daily, focusing on subjects that often receive little interest workshops, farm machinery, garden sheds, roofs of Paris. In a similar spirit, its nature dead are composed of simple objects taken from everyday life: a coffee grinder, a lamp, one pitcher, bicycles. The universe of his studio - where it is not the workshop itself - becomes, like a Courbet painting and about pretext for exploration and accumulation of chairs, tables, easels, chassis, where the man is apparently excluded.
Tungsten Most often his work is preceded by numerous sketches and drawings, almost always carried out at night by electric light as if Alain Mongrenier shut himself further and claimed paint in bright motionless, indifferent to the sunrises and sunsets. In this atmosphere neutral he worked until "the fabric breathes on all sides, that draws the eye to travel, whether Living."
mix techniques: acrylic, pastels, inks. Over the years, the palette is brighter, leaving the colors brown and tan. Now appear purple, yellow, pink and blue with subtle play of transparency, overlays, chance, the white of the canvas, to create a space left open, with light gaps.
The portrait is omnipresent in the work of Mongrenier. What matters is being able to capture the faces of both the outside and inside, translate on paper the main features of their character. Alain Mongrenier to how Quentin de La Tour, down deep in his models and "outweighs entirely unwittingly, in the words of the famous pastel.
Driven by a heightened sensitivity, a keen sense of observation, this portrait uses a very personal way ink, pencil or pastel, sometimes divided by oblique hatching, sometimes in tight lines, juxtaposed with interlocking or energy. It offers self-portraits and portraits of surprising modernity and an intense inner life.
Dismissed contemporary influences, Alain Mongrenier restores more than he is, the secrets of the visible. Through a modern work has the power to make us dream silently in a world marked by a quest for the absolute.
In the late 50s, Alain Mongrenier, determined has to be a painter, imagined what way would certainly not his. Even today after thousands of stars that mark his tenacious adventure, he continues to amaze and surprise us, as if, with him, we watched the riddle of the world for the first time.
