MOULY Marcel : LES ELEPHANTS

Marcel MOULY

Born in Paris in 1918.

Marcel Mouly, working within the classical French tradition (still lifes, indoor scenes, landscapes and seascapes), treats these forms realistically with a palette of brilliant primary colours that his composition charges with richness.

He remains within the limits of the cubistspaintings, where the structures of his emotion-evoking surface are more supple and apple so that the subjects do not impinge upon the constructive framework of his highly architectural style.

His works, however, avoid any illusioncreating perspective, in spite of their spatiality.

This great traveller opens for us the gate of his dreams, capturing the light, fragrance and atmosphere of each place he visits.

Marcel Mouly painting has the transparency of stained-glass window. The work is illuminated from the inside as if an invisible sun was irradiating it.

The blacks that the artist uses with maestria are set up like the leads of a glass master. For example its “nature morte devant la ville” allows us to notice that he favoured the reds and yellows, radiant sun colors. If we contemplate “Eclaircie sur le pont” or “transats au mouillage”, the clouds and the sea can be taken out like some pieces of colored glass cut of and assembled by a decision of the artist.

Marcel Mouly is a master of its art following the example of a glass master creating a stained-glass window: he shares out the density of the light and distributes on the canvas sunny intervals, shadows by emphasizing a tone, by softening a shade to create general harmony. As for the landscapes, they are more of an inspiration, a pretext than a subject the artist would owe something. Reporting from his trips numerous sketches on drawings, Marcel Mouly paints more after visual remembers than after a descriptive reality which would be too boring. Isn’t the art of the artist to translate the foreseen beauty with a personal language allowing the spectator to evade in a poetical world, discovering again what he already knew? This graphical and pictural approach endows the work of Mouly with an internal dimension thanks to which the artist gives himself up to those who follow him. We can feel in it a sensitive vibration, a creative momentum transposing the initial subject onto another plane, the one of harmony. Like this his pictural construction is undertaken for the service of an artistic will, real mirror of the personality of the artist. One can say, in a certain way, that the canvases of Mouly pertain to an intuitive sensation which, generally, is at the origin of a sincere and authentic creation.

A sharp sense of composition is also remarkable in its works as “Guitare blanche a l’echiquier bleu” or “mandoline sur l’echiquier”. A structure, very strict of lines and planes, weaves a framework which sets up the canvas and leaves the colour take all its importance: the resonance of whites or yellows which respond to one another, like the notes on a musical stave, each one at its place, its aim, and impossible to move without creating inevitably discordances.

The painted work of Marcel Mouly counts with force in the panorama of the contemporary painting. He managed to locate himself outside the fashions meanwhile staying in the tradition of the XXth century art.