Oil on canvas by Henri Morez, Paris, France, circa 1989

This large canvas perfectly illustrates the particular, mystical universe of the talented painter Henri Morez. Painting allows the artist to go beyond the world of violence that he experienced from childhood and adolescence and to express the solitude, emptiness, absence, nostalgia, which are his life companions.

From this painting emanates a heavy force expressed by clean lines, the movement of bodies, on the borders of the real and the invisible, and an almost oppressive, captivating play of shadows and light. The color palette used by the artist in this painting also contributes to the tension and confusion it inspires in the viewer.

Biography

Henri Morez (1922-2017)

Painter and cartoonist, friend of Sempé, Uderzo and Gosciny.

Henri Morez was noticed at an early age by painter Emmanuel Mané-Katz.
Talented artist, from the age of sixteen, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne since 1938, but the war destroyed his world. Denounced, his entire family was deported, and he never saw them again.

Art and and humor became a means of survival for the artist. In the 50s, his cartoons were published in Le Figaro littéraire, Paris Match, Jours de France… At the end of the 60s, he returned to painting, where he managed to make a name for himself in the Parisian milieu. For his first major exhibition, he was in 1968 at the gallery of Katia Granoff, who had worked to the recognition of Chagall and Soutine.

Henri Morez’s sometimes immense canvases, with their clean, geometric forms, bordering on abstraction, and a great mastery of gradation reinforce this sense of vertigo and eternal flight. A chosen solitude, necessary for his creation, Morez lives in opposition and violence in his studio in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which was once Mané Katz’s studio.He died in his studio in 2017.

Some of his exhibitions:
1968 Galerie Katia Granoff
1969 Galerie Christian Hals
1971 Centre culturel de Paris
1974 Galerie Transposition
1979-87 Galerie Claude Hemery
1980 Musée de Saint Maur
1982 Galerie du Cercle
1983 Galerie du Capricorne
1987-90 Galerie Forum des Arts
1988 Galerie de Sèvres
1989 Galerie Ariane
1993 Galerie Jean Tour
199 Galerie Sylvie Autef
2009 Galerie Larock-Granoff
2013 Galerie Schwab Beaubourg