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GERARD STRICHER 

Convulsive Landscapes -  By Christian Noorbergen

 

A man possessed, Gérard Stricher starts out with elemental outlines, telluric lines of force and prodigious flows of mental lava. Then throws away the key to the codes. Van Gogh, CoBrA and the archaic powers of forgotten countries are summoned up. Brief life and insane health: between the two a fiery art triggers our affective landscape. Close-up on the originary upsurges. The old world has to be remade. Real life is already always there.

 

Part invisible figuration, part embodied abstraction, extreme tensions driving creative chaos offer sovereign incantations of space. Singularly plastic structures emerge. And landscapes of immensity took horizons into the far distance. Multiple exploded forms traversed by all the world's dips and bumps. Working at his primal earth-matter from within, Stricher rips the picture surface. A fiery, untamed notation of disfigurement in the salutary no man's land of precluded meaning. Shredded space of a ceaselessly hacked art.

 

Stricher's devastated landscapes are arrested blinding insights. The fever of the deeps pervades these explosive chromatics and visionary upheavals. Frenetic pre-world landscapes bare of all cultural landmarks sabotage the inertia of reality and take root in the throes of desire. A strange sacrificial energy. In this art of brawling and battling the sources of the picture surface exult. The veins of the earth's deep blood are its pathways to the universe.

 

An earth-dweller to be reckoned with, Stricher comes on with a luminously barbarous art, one exulting in a primal well-being suffused with the devouring immensity of life and barely tamed magma. He tests out the solar vigour of those vital transgressions that sweep away our lives and our voids. His painting plots a course between stark chromatic planes and unyielding structural signs, between the breathing of buried flesh and a labyrinth of unsparing signs, between stylistic monumentality and the shamanically "charged".

 

Here and there, though, are tiny, delicate touches imbued with infinite sensitivity. Here and there Gérard Stricher releases masses of psychic oxygen into a space spattered with carnal profundities.

 

— Christian Noorbergen

Gérard Stricher Selected Works

Gérard Stricher in his Workshop: A video

Gérard Stricher: on Location

Vodeo Stricher

BIOGRAPHY:

Born into a family of artists in Sarrebourg, Moselle, in 1948, Gérard Stricher began painting in the 1970s, when he was an engineering student in Paris. He moved in art circles and found buyers and encouragement for his work, but his industrial bent led him to an international career in management. He became a « world citizen » and the resultant encounters with people, landscapes and cultures everywhere formed subconscious strata that would later surface in his painting.

In 2004 he bought an old mill in the Vexin region of northwestern France, where he set up his studio and began working intensely: this was a new adventure centred totally on his painting. An exhibition at Espace Commines in Paris in 2007 clinched his reputation with collectors and galleries: his pictures received an enthusiastic reception at the Bartlow Gallery in Chicago and his American career really took off with a one man show at Art Chicago. He was also shown by the Artbox Gallery in Indianapolis. His paintings were subsequently acquired by the Empire Bank in Springfield, Missouri, the PepsiCo Foundation in New York and various prestigious private collectors in the United States, including Bob Bohlen. These successes were followed by exhibitions at Galerie Protée and Galerie Schwab Beaubourg in Paris. 2012 saw Stricher on display at Laura Rathe Fine Art in Houston and Dallas, and at Galerie Lindengrün in Vienna (Austria).

In 2013 he exhibited at Galerie Mézières in Auvers-sur-Oise, and the following year at Galerie Kellermann in Düsseldorf and Galerie La Véluze in Honfleur. After winning the Dizart Editions competition in 2015 and being rewarded with a monographie, he has just shown at MM Gallery in Brussels. Mid 2017 he joined the Gallery Protée in Paris. During 2020 he joined Judy Ferrara Gallery in Chicago and the Taylor Fundation in Paris. In 2021 he joined Galerie l'Atelier in NYC.
 

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