Charles Lapicque - Theizé 1898 – Orsay 1988

Born in a family which practises sciences and arts, Charles Lapicque, in the humanist classical tradition, did not cease throughout his life to multiply experiments.

Both as an artist and a scientist, he carried on these two vocations for a long time at the same time. After graduating from the Ecole Centrale in Paris in 1921, he worked as an engineer until 1928. As he was compelled to accept in 1931 a post of demonstrator at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris, he benefited from the resources of his laboratory to carry out research on the perception of the colors which he applied to his painting and he did not hesitate to completely call into question the pictorial conventions resulting from the Renaissance. "The grid system" that he worked out in 1939, is the outcome of his optical discoveries, themselves underlain by a philosophical approach. This new style had a great influence on the painters of the exhibition"Twenty young painters of the French tradition", in which Lapicque took part in 1941 at the Braun gallery.

In 1943, he gave up his scientific career for good to devote himself entirely to his pictorial work. Against the prevailing trends of his time, he claimed in the Fifties his attachment to figurative painting, while making almost in spite of himself, some incursions into abstraction.

He went through small and great genres, keeping all his life a predilection for the theme of the sea for its magnificent colors and its dynamic compositions, always in search of the balance and bliss that he awaited from painting.

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Expert pour les oeuvres de Charles Lapicque: Marc Métayer.