Concept
Arnaud Courlet de Vregille (5 March 1958) is a French painter. Born into a family of painters and collectors related to Otto van Veen, Peter Paul Rubens' teacher, Arnaud Courlet de Vregille began to draw at a very early age and subsequently embarked on a painting-career : paintings, murals (fresco), theatre decors. In 1993, his talent as a painter was revealed when the Institut Supérieur de Paris awarded him a prize for his work Laisse-moi which work was acquired by the Ministry of Finance for the decoration of the Cité Administrative de Bobigny. The painter lives in Besançon (Doubs) where he pursues his artistic career. His work is known in France but also in Armenia and Russia. The Who's Who Art considers his art as an "lyrical abstraction", "futurism", "spontaneous painting". In 2004, the Encyclopédie des Arts en Franche-Comté dedicated him a reference article : "Painter who does not fit into any fixed category, exploring the very depths of abstract art in order to bring to the surface the merest of the figurative. His painting, which seems to emerge from a kind of coloured skin, expresses all the warmth of tortured reality. In the words of the artists, he paints his canvases both impulsively and after a phase of blending and condensing which are the fruits of lengthy period of preparation within himself. He marks some of his works with an often partially concealed circle of solitude which shatters to evoke the moment when reality become fragile and crakcks, giving way to the invisible as well as displaying the pulzzing conspicuousness of visible. The emotion which pervades his painting seems to spring from his movement, his violence, his light". On the occasion of the bicentenary exhibition of Claude Nicolas Ledoux (renowned French architect of the 18th century) at the Royal Saltworks in Arc-et-Senans, Franche-Comté (site listed as World Heritage by Unesco), the catalog Le deuxième regard wrote : "The painting of Courlet de Vregille enters into an almost natural relation with the inspiration of Ledoux; indeed both explore those paths which Bachelard referred to as "materialised imagination, that spiritual place where all forms of art converge and meet.
