Article de Armand LANOUX

Raquin, simply the name and nothing else ! It blows up into the mind, heavy and black, even before Zola. Name without first name affirming beyond standards that man and woman are on equal terms in the art of painting.

Let us now come to Raquin’s painting : radiance, shining colours, delicate lines, liquidity; the most accentuated shapes take on algues and lichens; no line drawing with respect to the spot which shows sumptuous over-painted scrapings through lacquer glaze. No geometry, solely biology. Woman, not man. In a word, a deny to the initial assertion of the name. Diluted, imperceptible, fluid, the disowned femininity gains the artist's universe within transposition. Woman shows, but it is no more woman's painting. Ophelia is no more the model, Ophelia paints...

These are the composites of a hymn to the light whichever the subject Bottom seascapes, rocks seen at less than a yard where animality fades within plant or mineral, more cloudy river or marsh depths, symphonies of dominant reds or cold blue waters, snow weaving subtle counterpoints with no reference to the theme, nude women (no matter the expression) matching the decor from which they come out. Raquin knew how to admire Monet’s profoundness, that Heraclite of the art of painting, and poetically shows a taste for limpidity : the soul of the world.

From impressionism to informality, rarely has a painter devoted himself to the most delicate shades of the four elements in which he dissolves in for assertion.

Armand LANOUX
de l'Académie Goncourt

 

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Article de Louis NUCERA

Blue is prominent in this water world where light plays with all the marvels from dawn to twilight. Raquin's dream is to catch the light who would materialise, in a way. That is, no doubt, her "little acre from God".

 

Louis NUCERA

 

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Article d'André VERDET

Coming from who knows where, strange white birds haunted the marshlands with the wings dashing against the spongy torpor’s of the waters scratched with gorse.

And in oblong calls were rushing the "elsewheres". A scent of moss and stagnant flowers stowed the passer-by on the edge of spell.

Sometimes, a tenth pierced the water to snap up large sun spots which were drifting off under the shade...

                                                                                                            André VERDET

 

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