Michel Cadoret de l'Epineguen was an important representative of French painting in the 50s and 60s, in his time he was distinguished by art critics and was a friend of Alexander Calder.
He spent much of his life in Mexico and the United States, so much so that he was called the most American of French painters by the art critic Pierre Courthion.
Born in Paris in 1912, he studied at the Beaux-Arts from 1928 to 1932. Mobilized in 1939 and taken prisoner, he escaped in 1940 before joining the Free French Forces in London.
In 1948, he moved to New York where he discovered post-war American artists. He then lived in Mexico until 1953.
In 1954, he returned to New York. He lived in an appartment lent to him by his friend Alexander Calder, then in Kurt Seligmann's studio. He exhibited at the gallery "The Contemporaries".
In 1957, he participated in an exhibition in Paris at the Creuze gallery "50 years of abstract painting". Before opening another exhibition at the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.
In 1960, he presented in New York at the "Norval" gallery a work-exhibition entitled "la passoire à connerie" (the bullshit sieve) with paintings and a text by himself and a musical introduction by Edgar Varese.
From a graphic point of view, at this time, Michel Cadoret's paintings present either colors in full paste worked with a spatula from which emerges the luminous source of the painting, colored forms around a core of which the circle or the arc of circle is the central element
The blues, yellows, reds, pinks burst out either in juxtaposed squares or enclosed in a black or brown net. From his Mexican experience he kept the taste of using natural materials.
In 1961, he exhibited at the Galerie du XXe siècle, with a presentation by critics Pierre Restany and Jacques Lassaigne, before returning to France in 1963. That same year, a monograph was devoted to him, written by Pierre Courthion, and he was represented by the Kaganovitch Gallery.
From 1968 onwards, he worked more and more on drawing and perfected his "micro-drawing" techniques and work with acrylic inks from the 1970s.
In 1972, he moved to Cerny and started to work only with drawing due to health problems. In 1974 a large exhibition in Saint-Germain-en-Laye presented a retrospective of his work, followed in 1981 by an exhibition in Créteil of his large paintings.
He died in 1985. A last exhibition in 1988 at the "Yves Gastou" Gallery presented his paintings from the 1950s and 1960s.
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