16. Jean René BAZAINE (1904-2001) The lamp, 1943 Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower right. Resigned, titled, and dated on the back. 41 x 24 cm. Exhibition : Galerie André-François Petit, 122 boulevard Haussmann (Label on back). The war years were decisive for Jean Bazaine. He was the organizer of of "Twenty young painters of French tradition" at the Braun gallery in 1941, the first exhibition of avant-garde painting during the Occupation. He joined the Carré gallery in 1942 and is close to Jacques Villon and young painters such as Lapicque and Estève. He comes little by little, as involuntarily, to the non figuration: the external forms of the object seem to burst the external forms of the object seem to burst under the push of the interior forces, but "The world, in the absence of being represented, must be present", he wrote in the 40s. Thus, his painting is opposed as well to the surrealism as to a purely intellectual abstraction. Painting the sea, the sky, the rocks, the trees, Bazaine seeks the geometry of the most elementary forms of the world. The light that he captures and the rhythms that he translates are those of the deepest reality, the one of which only the effort of a demanding sensitivity allows the discovery. Excerpt from the website www.bazaine.fr