The route
Guillaume Marchat, born in 1963 in Avignon
After studying business in Paris, he worked in financial markets in 1986.
He stayed there for five years before deciding to return to Avignon to take over the family brickworks. There, he discovered clay creation by developing a range of terracotta tiles, both raw and glazed.
In 1999, this creation was no longer economically viable, and he was forced to stop manufacturing to focus on the resale of home materials and products. It was at this point that he felt an irresistible urge to replace terracotta creation with drawing and painting.
For two years, he created naive pastels, but stopped painting due to lack of time after the birth of his three children.
It wasn’t until 2010 that his creative urge reappeared. It was no longer pastels but a mixture of acrylic paint, pastels, and paper.
Painting has become an essential complement to his professional life.
Self-taught contemporary painter
“For me, painting is an essential but secondary activity that exists as a reaction to the action of my professional life.”
One could not exist without the other. I am more attracted to active painters than to contemplative painters, to instinctive painters than to reflective painters. I paint like I eat: often, of everything, and very quickly, savoring the ephemeral reality of things.
I love that moment when I have the sensation of capturing something fleeting on the canvas.
The result is like the necessary but secondary digestion.
Only the act of painting matters; it can be instinctive, in one go without retouching, or on the contrary, endlessly worked, painted and repainted, in a controlled disorder creating energy and movement. There are no rules; only the sensation of a finished painting matters.
After starting with highly figurative subjects, then abstract ones, I am now influenced by quantum physics, painting pictures with a figurative abstraction.
Everything around us is composed of waves that become particles only when we observe them. Don’t our five senses limit us to a partial approach to reality?
Today
I try to represent things as they are, before we look at them.
Trying to capture the moment when waves transform into matter, just before becoming prisoners of our five senses.
I leave my brush free of all constraints to capture this fleeting instant that seems to correspond to the reality of things.
This moment, so difficult to grasp, often requires many drafts and many layers of acrylic paint, pencil, paper, and newspapers, before finding the most effective representation; the one that allows me to feel the vertigo of this profound, multidimensional reality.
I am particularly attached to the representation of heads, because behind these waves that become matter to form these faces, there are thoughts, feelings, and self-awareness.
