PROVENANCE:
Gallery Tamenaga, Paris
Private collection, Asia

This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

TERRASSE À SORENTE
JEAN FUSARO

Born in Marseille, France in 1925, Jean Fusaro studied in the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (National School of Fine Arts in Lyon). His exceptional gift in painting naturally sent him on the road toward becoming an artist, and he won various awards, including the Biennale de Menton (Menton Biennale), Prix Feneon (Feneon Prize) and the Prix de la Jeune Peinture (Young Painters’ Prize). He has been invited to the exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo, New York and various cities since 1950. Fusaro, in his early years, was regarded as an important member of the “Lyon School,” along with A. Cottavoz and J. Truphemus. Later, Fusaro and Cottavoz became r epresentative painters of the Parisian Neo-Figurative School. They were influenced by Post-Impressionism and the expression of light in the works of P. Bonnard, a representative artist of Les Nabis. Fusaro, even more than the others, creates directly with white to represent the rhythm between light and shadow .

Fusaro is skilled at capturing transient harmony in nature. Colors, composed by the artist, become the musical notes that form a harmonious quartet with the land, the sun, the air and the water. Marvelous landscapes, such as the harbor-side of Marseille, the Venice Canals, the streets of Nice, the Place de la Republique in Lyon and the rural beauty of Provence, are his endless inspiration. Those beautiful views sway along with his colors, while figures walk alone between those intuitive lines. The romantic Mediterranean ambience manifests on the canvas through his careful and exquisite depiction. Employing vivid and bright colors, his strokes appear careless but in fact are delicate and refined, reflecting his sensitive and tender inner world. Fusaro inherits the simplified and deformed decorative style of the French avant-garde Les Nabis school, which stressed the expression of poetic reality in painting. Fusaro’s works are well-acclaimed, collected in the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts, the Yamagata Museum, the Nagoya City Art Museum, and by various private collectors.

“Terrasse à Sorente” depicts a quiet moment at a pier. The artist chooses a downward-looking angle to arrange this painting: People at the pier overlook the harbor against the railing; the blue sea joins with the sky, while ships shuttle back and forth. The buildings in the distance and the continuous mountains occupy the space on the upper left, echoing the bright color in the foreground. Such an arrangement adds unexpected verve to the whole pictur e. To pursue a bright and brisk effect in coloration, Fusaro abandons rigid lines to outline the contours. Instead, he adopts careful and fragmented strokes to delineate the rolling waves. The ships on the ocean and the buildings on the other shore are all simplified and deformed, giving the image a strongly planar decorative aesthetic. Fusaro has played a brilliant concert of colors with his brush.