artist/ Macréau

France

He’s one of the precursors of raw art and free figuration, in the vein of Basquiat and Combas, whom he preceded and influenced. A painter who experienced success in the 60s before falling into obscurity. An artist with a tragic fate, who died in poverty.

Michel Macréau painted with brushes, straws, on various mediums: canvas, plywood, wood, furniture, newspaper, sheets, postal bags, agglo, and city walls, long before the trends of tagging and graffiti.

Close to some of CoBrA’s concerns, a precursor to urban graffiti, Michel Macréau’s work inscribes painting in the field of writing and drawing. It’s characterized by the complexity of an apparently clumsy figuration and the pictorial quality of sober lines playing with the space of the painting. He draws bodies and faces.

The human body, naked, without skin, for which he creates a metaphorical cartography where organs and orifices are excessively marked, sometimes to the point of discomfort. Symbols are rudimentary but effective. He fits right into the lineage of painting-writings where drawing is king. A graphic painting that’s sometimes brutal, fundamentally tender, underpinned by an almost palpable anxiety stemming from the most obsessive personal mythologies.

Michel Macréau’s work is imbued with pain and strangeness. The thirty or so portraits gathered here show evidence of a malaise bordering on madness. Composite faces with asymmetrical eyes, loaded with tribal symbols and crosses, tackling themes of childhood and religion.

Michel Macréau experienced success for only 10 years. He, who always refused to compromise his art, was quickly eclipsed by painters like Basquiat. He produced a rich body of work consisting of over 2,400 paintings or drawings, a primitive and generous transposition of his “Peace Plan,” written in four sincere and utopian manifestos.

The one often classified as a raw artist is certainly original but in the manner of medieval Catalan mysticism. His illuminations, an art of instinct and invention, tirelessly paint and repaint his universal society where kings and queens, popes, missionaries, and apostles, politicians, workers, and bosses coexist through dynamic harmonies of colors that reveal their affective tonality.