Fabienne Comte was born on 8 November 1963 in Lyon.
“Erupting Humanity
Fabienne Comte’s painting emits unmistakable energy. We can discern the generous, fiery and maybe sacrificial gesture. An exorcising gesture which rejects the figure as a privileged partner in a face-to-face encounter which the painter intends to dominate through a creative exercise which always sends her back to her starting point. Her journey is a solitary one. In order to follow it, we must also discard the drapes of a stereotyped classicism, shake off the old, ossified academic rags and violate a reassuring and misleading comfort. Painting is not meant to please. Was Fabienne Comte influenced by fate when she made her choice? If the human figure predominates her paintings, then undoubtedly it signifies that she has made an irreversible pact with it. The artist lucidly colludes with essentials: material and colour, to tell her story of humanity. The drawing emerges naturally in, and through, colour.
Expressionism hardly requires any tips from our school of painting, where balance in harmony is the key to quality. With Fabienne Comte, the uniqueness of her talent for exacerbation is justified by her inordinate taste for thick paint worked into carnal excesses, overstating her brush strokes to capture the image of a body. This metaphysical and physical relationship which the painter has with her model leads one to seek its origins. As regards narrative history, it is diverse. Translated through sequences which are but fragments of a whole, they are illustrations of a body which is subject to constant deciphering, like verses of a poem, renewed by thematic and recurrent ebbs and flows.
Each of Fabienne Comte’s paintings is a mirror where our gaze, disturbed and uncertain, enters and is lost. Her painting is a receptacle for a sole yet multiple truth, where a formal virginity which echoes her personal visions, is revealed.” Lydia Harambourg
Education:
1982 – Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Lyon
1987 – Post-graduate degree in Fine Arts
Plastic Arts Department, under the leadership of M. Lemab
1993 – Masters degree in Ethnology
Solo exhibitions:
1985 – Mural fresco (25m²) at Muy in the Var region
2002 – Galerie Claude Goudal – Lyon
2004 – Galerie Claude Goudal – Lyon
2005 – Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
2008 – Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
2010 – Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
2012 – Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
Group exhibitions:
1999 – Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
2000 Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
Awards: The Grand Prix du Salon / Le Prix du Dessin (drawing prize)
2001 – Guest of Honour, Salon International de Printemps – Société Lyonnaise des
Beaux-Arts
2003 – Guest of Honour at the Cité des Peintres – Morestel (Isère)
Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
Award: Gallery Prize
2004 – Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
2005 – From the « Ziniars » to Contemporary Art – Cour des Loges – Lyon
Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
Guest of Honour at Salon des Beaux-Arts, Macon
Carte blanche, André Mure – Lyon
2006 – Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
2007 – Salon Comparaison – Paris
Salon de la Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts
Group exhibition – Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
2008 – Jos Depypere Gallery – Kuurne (Belgium)
2009 – Salon Comparaison – Paris
Galerie des Tuiliers – Lyon
Jos Depypere Gallery – Kuurne (Belgium)
2011 – Salon Comparaison – Paris