ROBERT LE RICOLAIS (1884-1977) Lot n° 172

ROBERT LE RICOLAIS (1884-1977) The church Oil on canvas signed lower left and dated 1928 Painted on the reverse side of a village lane 46 x 55 cm Robert le Ricolais was born in La Roche-sur-Yon in 1884, and died in Paris in 1977. He was not an architect, engineer or mathematician, but an inventor of new forms, structures and static calculations. His university studies in mathematics and physics were interrupted by the First World War, from which he returned seriously wounded. From 1918 to 1931, he lived in Paris, attending the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière and Montparnasse, where he worked as a constructivist painter. In 1931, he moved to Nantes to work as an engineer for Air Liquide (1930-1943). During this period, he developed air-compressor systems that enabled him to create abstract, surrealist and constructivist paintings using paint projections. He can be considered a precursor of the spray-painting technique often used by artists in the street art movement. He registered patents. Inspired by the morphostructural richness of nature, his "corrugated sheets and their application to light metal constructions" launched a lifelong reflection on the economy of materials. During the Second World War, Le Ricolais developed the Aplex process, a three-dimensional framework that, in a context of material scarcity, enabled the construction of large spans without intermediate support points, notably for hangars, covered markets and halls. He also focuses on the knot, the central element of spatial structures. A member of various networks (Union des artistes modernes, Espace group), he struggled to gain recognition in France. In 1951, he emigrated to the United States, where he created the Architectural Structure Chair for the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, in 1968, he founded the Institut de recherches et d'applications des structures spatiales (IRASS), which became the Institut Le Ricolais after his death in 1977.