Michel Potage (1949-2020)

Coupe de fruits 1999 Oil on canvas stapled to panel, monogrammed, dated and signed on back 18 x 29 cm "The comings and goings between the living room and the studio are becoming more and more numerous, in vain. I can't. Not in place Then it becomes rarer. We settle into our gaze A few days when it seems to flow Then it all goes wrong. I keep telling myself: let go, but it doesn't work. I'll try anything to the point of self-loathing." Michel Potage (in Michel Potage Greenyard Pieces, published by Henry Bussière Art's, 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 aged 65, disappeared from the picture rails some ten years ago." The artist left us in 2020, and the news hasn't caught up with him yet. A romantic and figurative artist from the late 70s onwards, Michel Potage admired the paintings of Francis Bacon, and was an anachronistic figure: while Warhol sold us his 15 minutes of fame, he claimed on Thierry Ardisson's show "I try to be nobody, I am nobody". This explains why his work is like no other. Michel Potage is a painter through and through: he paints in the solitude of the sacred place that is his studio, after waiting a long time for inspiration... and when it comes, he becomes frenetic, relentless, virtuoso. He paints the subject to the point of exhaustion, hence his serial work: the Aborigines, the correspondence between Van Gogh and his brother Theo, the Gypsies, the mythical Trees series... Potage is demanding of himself, even uncompromising: in a poem written on the occasion of his exhibition at Galerie Guigon in November 1997, he writes: "My eyes fall out Every day I want to paint The painting that's missing To my conception of painting In this very moment." In an interview with Thierry Ardisson on Lunettes noires pour Nuits blanches on October 28, 1989, Michel Potage declared, "I paint for myself, and for a few friends...". Let's bet that, as time goes by, his friends will become more and more numerous.