Simon Blau

Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams, Simon Blau affirms that painting is a commitment to himself and that he has no other alternative. His work as a painter is a mode of existence, a form of escape rooted in him.

Born into a family of artists, painting imposed itself on him as the most immediate natural way to express himself, like a native language composed of touches, colors, strokes, shapes, syntactically composed, staged to present a thing, the fruit of astonishment, of questioning.

His pictorial research focuses on the inside and beyond, the limit and the infinite, openings, horizons, suspension, the moment, reproduction and its corollary mimesis, the human as a source of knowledge and reason of his own perceptual fading.

His painting with dreamlike and even philosophical aspects reads above all as an invitation to the field of possibilities, the artist likes to leave the doors open, to confront even the absurdity of dissonant dreams.

Beyond this conceptual approach Blau attaches itself to form and prefers to leave the meaning to the intimate appreciation of each person. Reducing a work to the words of a commentary is sometimes muzzling its internal eloquence; he prefers to let the “inner life of things" mentioned by Bergson whisper or let the silent life of the “actors" of his scenes emerge. and talk about the sensory exercise of the act of painting.

In the act of painting he attaches himself to his sensations, he likes to smell the smell of color, the sound of values, to listen to the “little phrase" of shapes, to caress the material, to touch the support, to search the surface of the gestures, listening to the moment.

For him, painting is a full and complete being in the world, both derisory and essential.

Simon Blau is a former student of the Beaux-Arts and winner of numerous prizes including that of the Institute, he practices his profession away from the tumult.