Les Marines de Dilasser – Exposition

To mark the centenary of the birth of the painter François Dilasser, the Atelier François Dilasser association is organising a major retrospective at ten venues in Brittany. The Musée National de la Marine is presenting a dozen of the painter's maritime-inspired works.

Throughout his life, the sea was François Dilasser's familiar horizon. He spent part of his time in Kerlouan, just a stone's throw from the water, and had a studio in Brignogan. Two or three times a week he walked and ran on the Keremma beach. The sea, then.

However, and this is due to the very nature of his work, there is no direct illustration of this inclination here. The archetypal form that appeared in 1973, a kind of parallelepiped, both frame and outline, evoking the appearance of ancient and legendary ships, was to be articulated in the masterly assemblages known as "Passage of the Red Sea".

Later, a friend, the writer Jean-Pierre Abraham, pointed out to the painter the existence of an all-red lightship in the port-museum of Douarnenez. This was to be the starting point for a series that included the Têtes marines or Pré bateaux-feux and then the Bateaux-feux themselves. To these should be added an earlier, more directly landscape-based series whose title comes from the name of a rock in the English Channel, Yok.