Gerard Fromanger was born in 1939. GÉRARD FROMANGER Artist's comment collected by the owner: "The artists obviously speak with their colors and their brushes but this is a way for me to thank the collectors and the Belgians to whom I owe a lot in the 70s until 1980; I have exhibited a lot in Belgium and it is a real pleasure very different from Paris. For example there was always mark on the invitation card IN PRESENCE of the ARTIST ... so that for us it was extraordinary because in France it did not exist; we were flattered, proud and in addition that forced us to come ... and in general at a given moment in those years, the collectors, the people present who came to the opening sat down and asked questions to the artist, which did not exist in Paris, never. So it was an art world extraordinarily warm, friendly and generous. So I made a first exhibition in Beaubourg in 1980 and this painting called "The View" is written on the middle, is part of a series around the tapestries of the Lady Unicorn. You will be able to go to the Museum of the Hotel de Cluny where there are these six gigantic tapestries, much larger than each of these paintings in the series, but these paintings are already big but the tapestries are even bigger. They had been discovered by Prosper Mérimée, in the years 1870-80 there, in a castle in Burgundy called Boussac folded in twenty (very ...), it dates from 1650. He made them immediately restored and they found a fantastic room which has just been arranged in the museum of the Hotel de Cluny, rue des écoles in Paris. The entrance is 6 Place Paul Painlevé. It is these originals that influenced me, inspired. So these tapestries are what we called at the time of the thousand flowers that is to say that the decorations were the landscape of the time that is to say the forests, the birds, the fields, the animals , etc ... The landscape, today of thousand flowers, what is it? It was the map of the world ... we are globalized, we were already in 1980 ... and on each of the 6 paintings that imitate the 6 tapestries there were a thousand flowers, a map of the world, a map populations, a map of agriculture, a map with different colors and each of the 6 paintings had as first color one of the 6 primary and complementary colors. There were 3 warm colors: red, yellow and orange and three others imitating tapestries cold colors: purple, blue and green. These tapestries had a background of a thousand flowers and have an island in the middle. So I reproduced the island on each of these complementary color paintings of the dominant red color the complementary color being green, the island is green. I wrote the name "The View" and on the original tapestry, the tapestries tells the mysteries of the Middle Ages, the mysteries of love, the mysteries of courtly love and the lady is still represented on the island with a unicorn and the unicorn was the symbol of love and could not be touched, probably it's a very erotic symbol because the famous horn of the unicorn could only be touched by a virgin, and the day a virgin caressed this tense phallus she revealed mysteries probably religious of the time. So I replaced ..., the lady is always there at the top right and as it is called "the view" I took again one of the passages of the tapestry where the lady makes himself look in a mirror the unicorn that's why it's called "La Vue", the unicorn is reflected in a mirror. In the middle there is one of the animals of the thousand flowers and on the left another one of the animals all looking at the lady. These 6 tapestries (were ordered by Jean de Viste for the wedding of his daughter) represent the 5 senses: this one the sight, another the hearing, the smell the taste, the touch, and the last is called "My only desire" And so I replaced the mysteries of the Middle Ages with what is for me always mysterious and I hope for the spectators: the mysteries of art and painting. And I put on the island, like traces of a path of the little pout in the forest of the world, the smallest gesture that the painter makes while working with the knife, with a cloth, with a sponge, with the brush that runs I put them enlarged on the island so as to represent in an exhaustive way, marveled in an exhibition which was called "Everything is lit", the world is lit, the energy of the world works like that from as if by the mysteries of painting. "