EUGENE BEGARAT Lot n° 339

VERY NICE AND INTERESTING POINTILLIST PAINTING "CHILDREN'S GAMES IN A GARDEN BY THE SEA" BY Eugène BEGARAT (Born in1943) Oil on canvas signed in the lower right corner. Nice gilded wood frame. 61 x 50 cm Eugène Bégarat is a painter born in Nice in 1943. At the age of seventeen, he entered the School of Decorative Arts of his native city, then joined the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1964. Passionate about color and light, Bégarat is part of the great classical trend in contemporary art. He was inspired by the technical advances of the post-impressionists to build a personal touch that renewed and modernized pointillism and chromatic divisionism. At the beginning of his career, he moved to Brittany to soak up the light that inspired Felix Vallotton and the Nabis. He then left in search of stronger colour contrasts and travelled to southern Europe and Mediterranean Africa (Spain, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia). His style was consolidated and refined by contact with the vibrant lights of the South. He returned to France, first to Paris and then to Provence, near Vence, where he built an open-air studio/garden in which he installed his models adorned with brilliant fabrics. He thus developed a body of work in which the horizon gradually disappeared in favour of frames of foliage and natural elements sculpted by the light. In this way, he created infinite variations on women and their clothing, where the radiance of a skin tone and the shine of a head of hair are highlighted by the colourful satins and shimmering silks that he likes to use. As time went by, his touch abandoned the sole recourse to divionism to integrate more and more coloured areas, without light ceasing to be the pivot of his art. Eugène Bégarat has never been concerned with the quarrels and fashions that mark contemporary art. Indifferent to the critical condemnations that so disturbed the figurative artists of the 20th century, he built a solid and coherent body of work around light and colour in order to sculpt, painting after painting, his vision of a sublimated femininity, both eternal and subtly contemporary. His works are present in major international collections.