1840 -1916 · Bordeaux, Paris and symbolism

Visionary blacks, figures with closed eyes and luminous blooms make Odilon Redon the great French painter of inner dreams.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux in 1840 and died in Paris in 1916. For a long time, he built his universe almost exclusively in black, using charcoal and lithography. Trained with the engraver Rodolphe Bresdin and deeply marked by Goya, Rembrandt, Delacroix and Gustave Moreau, he invented floating eyes, smiling spiders, severed heads and hybrid creatures which give shape to the powers of the imagination. From the 1890s, color established itself in his pastels and paintings. Closed eyes, painted in 1890s and probably inspired by his wife Camille, made a face float between sleep, death and apparition; the work becomes an icon of symbolism. The Cyclops transforms the mythology in tender and disturbing vision. The Char d'Apollon, around 1910, contrasts the solar momentum of the god with the monster defeated in a pastel conflagration. The Birth of Venus combines figure, water and color without seeking realistic description. In Redon, flower, myth and face never refer to a stable external world: they open an interior space where dreams, spirituality and colored matter merge. In Redon, flower, myth and face never refer to a stable external world: they open an interior space where dreams, spirituality and colored matter merge. The "Odilon Redon" selection notably compares The Cyclops and The Closed Eyes. His reading favors color.

Redon makes visible what has no fixed form: the dream becomes face, the flower becomes light and the myth arises like a colored thought.