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Christian LABROUSSE was born on 23rd of April, 1940 in Saint-Nazaire (France).
Family background
He was brought up by François Garnier, professor at Rennes Art school. Ever since childhood, he was initiated to painting and drawing. He posed as a model for his father, for children portraits. Other Painters shared the family’s holidays.
First steps as an artist
At primary school, Christian LABROUSSE was noticed for his gift and taste for drawing. At college, and until his baccalaureat, he was always the best. When a teenager, he used to draw portraits of his relatives.
Doctor or artist ?
He hesitated between Art School and Medicine. Finally he chose medicine, but did not give up his other passion : he attended night classes at Rennes Art school, where he studied drawing with Xavier de Langlais.
Thesis about the pictorial expression of schizophrenics
By the end of his medical studies, he opted for another vocation : psychiatry. He runned the Drawing and Painting workshop of his Department at the Psychiatric hospital of Rennes. The subject of his thesis was “The pictorial expression of schizophrenics”. After this thesis, he wrote and published several articles about pictorial creation of insanes. He joined the French Society of Psychopathology of Expression.
1976 – Learning oil painting
François Garnier taught him oil painting. For 4 years, during his spare time, he learnt with this Master.
1990 – First steps in the Carreer
After a 9 year break, which is part of his artistic progression, he rediscovered painting.
1996 – First exhibition
Between 1990 and 1996, he painted about 50 works, which express his imaginary world and show his technique : compositions, portraits, nudes, landscapes and still lifes. Most of these paintings were displayed is his first exhibition in Rennes in May-June 1996.
1997-1998
Exhibitions in Touraine and Brittany.
30 June 1998
Christian LABROUSSE quit his medical practice and devoted exclusively to painting.
Presentation of the artist
Art as an end
Does Christian LABROUSSE’s painting have a specific meaning for him ? Does it deliver a message ? He answers : “no, obviously not…Art is an end in itself. Its first aim is aestheticism... Interpretations are given afterwards. The artist creates first and foremost for himself. His creative process, by which he shows his presence to the outside world, works without any finality, short – circuiting the intellect. Being a prolongation of his own self, its stems from an almost organics need".
Creation and loneliness
He paints alone, mostly in his studio. He paints whilst listening music, his other passion, associated to his loneliness in front of the unfinished work.
His works
The sources of his inspiration are numerous. Christian LABROUSSE is an eclectic artist. He works with or without a model. Like many painters, he used to have a dark, jostled, monochromic period. Today his range of colours is more diversified, brighter and polychromic. He works on canvas, sometimes on wood. Due to the variety of his themes (landscapes, still lives, unusual objects, imaginary compositions) his is the work of a complete artist.
Evolution of the artist
True to his plural vocation, C. Labrousse develops a diversified production. To those who could hold against him a certain measure of dilettantism, he likes to answer that, supposing that he is looking for his true self, he intends never to find it... For C. Labrousse, painting is an adventure, an exploration of roads to him unknown, where he crosses the paths of his much admired Masters, enabling him to sharpen his technical skills.
A traveller and paysagiste of cities he paints Europe , the Far South and the Orient, while keeping a predilection for the unusual, depending on his encounters.
During the year 2005, C. Labrousse ventures to the borders of abstraction (geometrical abstraction).
He knows that tomorrow, he will be elsewhere.
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