Roger BEZOMBES

Roger Bezombes was interested in monumental art from his early artistic beginnings. He received numerous commissions for tapestries from the State, first woven at the Gobelins and then at Aubusson, notably with the Hamot manufactory, whose dyers obtained wools for him in the exact tone of his cartoons (which he painted himself at full scale). In 1952-1953, he created a monumental ensemble (300 m2) for the Pavilion of France Overseas at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. He abandoned the low-warp technique at the end of the 1950s to create wall hangings made from assembled fabrics.

Specifically, his murals (one of the first, 'Music', 25m long, was commissioned for the Maison de la Radio) are patchworks of assembled fabrics, sometimes joined by objects of various materials sewn, glued or stapled. However, as here, some murals will be reproduced in tapestry weave by the Saint-Cyr workshop of Pierre Daquin. The theme of the fish is then omnipresent; Bezombes is not an ichthyologist, but a poet: it is the cardinal purple that interests him, not the homonymous species.