Philippe Charpentier is a painter, engraver and lithographer born in Paris on March 3, 1949. He lives and works in Savigny-en-Sancerre. Initially a musician (drums) in jazz groups for about ten years (1970-1980), he later devoted himself entirely to painting, studying painting and engraving (including the technique of carborundum) in the studio of Henri Goetz. After a bachelor’s degree in management at Paris-Dauphine University in 1969-1971, Philippe Charpentier was in the 1970’s drummer in jazz orchestras. Alin Avila restores the lasting imprint on his pictorial expression of his attendance in 1976 at the academy of Henri Goetz which led him to abandon music in 1979 to devote himself entirely to painting: In Henri Goetz’s studio, he divests himself of his adolescent ways: figurative, dark. He discovers colors - tones and shades - and it will be necessary, for his first works, to evoke the influence of the profession of engraving, while he rubs his supports as the engraver does to polish his plates or craft tools so that they meet his expressive needs». His selection for the Prix Fénéon, at the Katia Granoff Gallery in 1981, his first solo exhibition and his first participation at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in the same year are followed by about 170 solo exhibitions and more than 450 group exhibitions in France and around the world.
If you had to make a precise inventory, I would say that there is color, lots of colors, drips, stains, hatches, tears, collages, bulges, discoverable things and other uncertainties. I’m talking about a painting by Philippe Charpentier, any painting by Philippe Charpentier. At first glance, it seems a little confused, a little chaotic, a little disorderly, but we have the feeling that we can add nothing to it, or take anything away. /... I think back to the texts that Vassily Kandinsky wrote about the sound of colors, about their musicality. Charpentier was once a jazz musician: he played drums; his painting keeps this rhythm constantly broken, then glued, shifted but always fair. She also keeps the violence under control, the spirit, the dynamism.” Olivier Céna