Roger BEZOMBES

Roger Bezombes was interested in monumental art from the very beginning of his artistic career. He received numerous tapestry commissions from the French government, initially woven at the Gobelins Manufactory and later in Aubusson, notably with the Hamot factory, whose dyers provided him with wool in the exact shades of his cartoons (which he also painted himself at full scale). In 1952-1953, he created a monumental tapestry (300 m²) for the French Overseas Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. He abandoned the warp-weave technique at the end of the 1950s, opting instead to create wall hangings made from assemblages of fabrics.

Specifically, his "murals" (one of the first, "Music," 25 meters long, was commissioned for the Maison de la Radio) are patchworks of assembled fabrics, sometimes incorporating objects of various materials sewn, glued, or stapled on. However, as seen here, some murals were reproduced as tapestries by Pierre Daquin's Saint-Cyr workshop. The theme of fish is omnipresent; Bezombes is not an ichthyologist, but a poet: it is the cardinalfish that interests him, not the species of the same name.