Lucien Mathelin (1905-1981). Self-portrait. Oil On Canvas.

Lucien Mathelin (1905-1981)
Self-portrait
Oil on canvas
H. 81 cm - L. 60 cm

Superb self-portrait full of sensitivity of the master of diversion.

Lucien Mathelin was born into a family of artists and received artistic training from childhood. He produced his first oil on canvas at the age of 15 in 1920. In 1924, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne of which he became a member. He did not study plastic arts, but he traveled to Morocco (1925-1926) and Greece (1933-1934), where he enriched his palette. In 1937, Mathelin worked for a time for Raoul Dufy on the creation of the gigantic painting La Fée Électricité.

Although this painter was never part of the group of surrealist artists, his daughter, Marie, described his work as "trompe-l'oeil surrealism". Indeed, many of his canvases, produced using the trompe-l'oeil technique, refer to this pictorial movement. One of his main paintings, L'Atelier de Galanis, dates from 1946. Démétrios Galanis, engraver, worked at 12 rue Cortot in Paris, where the Montmartre museum is currently located. In 1971, Mathelin's submissions caused a scandal during an ARC exhibition where he presented the Monumensonges series at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris.

Then came the Détournements, then the cats and the agricultural implements, the ironwork objects that he collected and with which he covered a wall of his studio. Lucien Mathelin divided his time between the Villa des Arts, his Paris studio and his house in Cotignac, in the south of France, of which "he painted, sculpted, glued, sawn, planed, repainted again, the visible plots and the materials present". He also escaped to his house in Hannaches, in Picardy. The family received his musician friends Arthur Honegger and Marcel Landowski.

Mathelin brings a disturbing grain of sand by denying the usual relationships we have with objects and by denouncing the false relationships we have with things. Humor is always present in his painting with thoughtful and refined compositions, highlighted by a fresh and harmonious chromatic range.

Strong of success in Parisian galleries and salons, the artist's works are kept at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, at the Montmartre Museum, at Dalas in the United States and Gothenburg in Sweden.

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