TEFAF New York 2024

For TEFAF New York, Petzel is pleased to present paintings by Roger-Edgar Gillet (1924–2004), surveying over three decades of the French artist’s oeuvre from 1965–1998. Having turned away from abstraction in the late 1950s, this presentation highlights the evolution of Gillet’s figurative work he began making in the 1960s.

The works presented here will be on view at Petzel’s TEFAF New York stand in Stand 354.

Visiting New York in 1955, Gillet had an encounter at the Metropolitan Museum that would deeply influence his future practice. As he recounted to Alexis Pelletier in 1998: “I was stopped cold in front of a painting by El Greco, the portrait of a bishop or a cardinal, wearing tiny glasses. Faced with the cruelty of this gaze, I said to myself that with abstract painting one lost something: one could no longer paint the depths of that gaze.”

At once lyrical and grotesque, Gillet’s canvases employ virtuoso paint-handling to depict strange figures with distorted bodies, atrophied limbs, and defaced heads. In both his portraits and crowd scenes Gillet favored a muted palette, dominated by umbers, ochres and blacks. Inspired by the horrors of the 20th century, as well as his childhood memories of carnivalesque Paris street fairs, Gillet shares an affinity for the abject with contemporaries such as Fautrier, Wols and Francis Bacon, but his greatest influences were historical: Goya’s Black Paintings, Daumier’s cruel satires of French jurists and Ensor’s hallucinatory crowd scenes.

As Raphael Rubinstein writes in his catalogue essay The Figure Disfigured, “notably, these unsettling effects are achieved with bravura painterly techniques. Every one of Gillet’s canvases offers a masterclass in alla prima brushwork and fearless scumbling and scraping with a palette knife. He activates his surfaces with wave upon wave of buttery oil paint, applied with generosity and nervous energy.” Gillet’s sense of gesture is furious, furrowed, a flourish of painterly rapture. His brooding palette and rippled surfaces oscillate between beauty and cruelty, ecstasy and decay, painting figures that seem to collapse and erode upon themselves. Gillet’s approach to figuration reveals prevailing literary and philosophical attitudes from the artist’s zeitgeist, but also his more interior musings. As he stated in 1998, “I don’t distort the faces for the pleasure of distorting them. I distort them to arrive at the maximum point of expression.”

Gillet is represented in important institutional collections, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. In 2023, Gillet had a solo exhibition at the Espace Rebeyrolle in Eymoutiers. He will also have a travelling exhibition in 2026 at the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and then at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes.