Michel Potage (1949-2020)

Table 2002 Oil on paper mounted on panel monogrammed and dated lower right 140 x 140 cm Provenance: > Galerie Thierry Spira, Paris (label on back) > Private collection, Paris "The comings and goings between the living room and the studio are becoming more and more numerous, vain I do not hold. Not in place Then it becomes more rare. One settles in the glance A few days when it seems to flow Then everything goes wrong. I keep telling myself: let go, but nothing works. I will try everything until I feel disgusted with myself. Michel Potage (in Michel Potage Greenyard Pieces, Henry Bussière Art's edition, Paris, 1996) In an article dated May 17, 2015 published in Télérama, Olivier Cena asks: "What has become of Michel Potage? The work of this French painter, now 65 years old, disappeared from the picture rails about ten years ago." The artist left us in 2020 and the news has not yet caught up with him. Romantic and figurative from the late 70s, admiring the painting of Francis Bacon, Michel Potage is anachronistic: when Warhol sells us the fifteen minutes of fame, he proclaims at Thierry Ardisson "I try to be nobody, I am nobody". This explains why his work is unlike any other. Michel Potage has the painting pegged to the body: he paints in the solitude of the sacred place that is his studio, after having waited a long time for the inspiration... and, when it rises, he becomes frenetic, relentless, virtuoso. He paints the subject until it is exhausted, hence a serial work: the Aborigines, the correspondence between Van Gogh and his brother Theo, the Gypsies, the mythical series of Trees ... Potage is demanding with himself, even intransigent, in a poem written on the occasion of his exhibition at the Guigon gallery in November 1997, he writes: "My eyes are falling out of my head Every day I want to paint The painting that is missing To my conception of painting In the very moment." When he spoke with Thierry Ardisson in Lunettes noires pour Nuits blanches on October 28, 1989, Michel Potage declared "I paint for myself, and for some friends...". Let's bet that over time, his friends will be more and more numerous. Condition report : Box