Goulien in Brittany, France - Didier LAPÈNE

Title : Goulien in Brittany, France

Artist : Didier LAPÈNE (born in 1964)

Technique : Oil on canvas

Dimensions : 97 x 146  cm

Signed

2017/21

A former student of the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Didier Lapène completed this renowned training by benefiting from an important stay at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid. With proven knowledge of the painter's profession, he has developed an original approach to landscape, free from the formal contingencies of our time. Reconnecting with the ambition of artists subscribing to plein airism, he regularly places his easel in front of the motif and declines in multiple studies the vast panoramas that he aims to describe. Attracted by the marine spaces that border the Basque coast as far as the dunes of the North Sea, Didier Lapène began important work in Brittany several years ago. 

Fascinated by the immense horizon that unfolds off the coast of Camaret, he exercises his art with patience and tenacity, seeking, in the famous words of Cézanne, “the little sensation”, which transfigures the reality of the landscape.

Guided by the sites of this famous advance of the Crozon peninsula, Didier Lapène has composed an extraordinary colorful score which interweaves rocky cliffs, hemmed beaches or green meadows tumbling towards the ocean.
Throughout the summer of 2022, the Museum of Fine Arts brought together more than one hundred and twenty unpublished works, the true sum of a pictorial quest which also revives the memory of some illustrious elders like Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin or Paul Signac. For several years , Didier Lapène patiently examines the confines of the Crozon peninsula, happy to have discovered the dream stopover for any painter wishing to strengthen the art of landscape. His choice, far from appearing dictated by chance, stems from a detailed knowledge of a small number of ingredients necessary for the development of the gaze. Around Camaret, the coast unfurls wild spaces, alternating rough cliffs and long beaches with the immense solitude of the Iroise Sea as a border.

And then, everywhere, an always different sky which recounts the passages of the seasons like the moods of time, arousing in the artist the prescience of a natural harmony which is also an eternal beginning.

Didier Lapène belongs to this generation of independent artists who escape summary classifications. As the painters of the Barbizon school had anticipated, he works on the representation of the visible in order to better grasp its impalpable forms, conscious of an interior life which irrigates secret presences: the murmur of the air, throbbing of water, reflections of the sun's rays, soft effects of mist, rustling of grains of sand, clashing of pebbles...
 

Text by Guillaume AMBROISE

Chief curator of the Quimper Museum of Fine Arts