About the artist:

François Heaulmé is an expressionist painter of the Paris School born September 26, 1927 in Saint-Jorioz (Haute-Savoie), settled in the district of Montmartre and Saint-Cirice (Cahors) in the Lot, died October 23 2005. François Heaulmé completed his secondary studies at Thônes high school (He will remember gratefully a good teacher, the Abbe Greffier, who directs his rhetoric exercises to painting) and then the Lycée Michelet in Paris. It was thus from his early youth that he was self-taught and a regular at the Louvre Museum, and studied painting on the motif. Living then in a modest room in the Rue Mademoiselle (he will settle later in Montmartre), he will live decorative painting shades and restoration of old paintings. In museums, François Heaulmé will copy Pierre-Paul Rubens, he will be particularly interested in Goya, Rembrandt and Honoré Daumier, while among the painters of his time, he will admire Francis Gruber, Bernard Lorjou and Paul Rebeyrolle4. It was in 1956 that the art dealer Hervé Odermatt discovered the painting of François Heaulmé and that he affirmed himself upset by the expressionism acting of the one who will become his foal. Choosing to stay away from the capital, François Heaulmé leaves Paris for the nearby Marne department (where he can share his time between his plastic works, the Parisian obligations and his pleasures of reading and fishing). ), then in 1967 for Saint-Cirice (Lot) where he restores with his own hands an eighteenth-century property. It is in the Lot that he approaches the expression by the print with the monotype, called to constitute this important part of his work that he will present in New York where he will stay throughout the year 1979. In his autobiographical text The Dog of the Pastry Chef, François Heaulmé strives to define expressionism: it is "as if the image, unable to take off from the world, of itself, engorged with its own sensuality, exasperated on herself, often indulging in the worst debauchery. Then, concluding in the form of a confession on his own painting: I often committed this worst under expressionist label. How many dogs have I not led to torture and death by the untimely zeal of the image? No complicity in complicity with death, no moralizing purpose behind this gesture. Simple admission of helplessness to celebrate beauty. Even if the "black suns" can sometimes blind a strange beauty. The image, not being able to testify to the highest silence, perceived from the start a greater convenience in feeding with noise and horror. The admission of his sincerity does not absolve his perversion. This is the tragedy of a certain expressionism. he said: "I want to live very old to paint windows open on very blue skies. But when he left this world in October 2005, François Heaulmé was not "very old".