La cage aux oiseaux (the bird cage)
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Pinton workshop.
With label, n°1/6.
Circa 1980.
Although in his youth Lorjou was a silk fabric designer and an artist specialising in large formats used as posters for exhibitions (“la peste en Beauce” “the plague in the Beauce” 1953, measuring 250 x 360cm for example), he only turned his hand to tapestry design relatively late on : maybe he felt that his rather rough and ready style was somehow inappropriate to being woven (it is noteworthy that other artists to whom he was close, Rebeyrolle, Mottet, Sébire, … never had their work realised as tapestries). In the 1970’s his style moved away from expressionism to something more dreamlike and it is at this point that he gave a few designs to the Pinton workshop.
The colours employed, the bird motifs are all characteristic of Lorjou’s work in the 1970’s. The effects created by the thickness of the paint used are rendered in the tapestry by the use of different stitches.
