Charente Libre - "AUNAC-SUR-CHARENTE: FROM CHENOMMET TO NEW YORK, ANNE MOREAU'S PAINTINGS CROSS THE ATLANTIC"

The painter Anne Moreau will exhibit her works at the Amélie art gallery in Soho, New York, next April. An opportunity for the artist to reflect on the essence of her work, travel.

In February, Anne Moreau settled into what she calls her winter studio within her longhouse, in the heart of the village of Chenommet, in Aunac-sur-Charente. A wood stove in the middle of the room warms the space. Hanging on the wall, some canvases await, suspended in the gaze and desire of the painter. "When I arrive in the studio, I don't know what will happen, I never make a sketch." A work can be born, but another can evolve by adding a touch of color or text. "A canvas continues to live, and it is finished when there is writing and it leaves the studio," says the artist, ten of whose paintings will join the walls of the Amélie gallery in the Soho district of New York next April. It's a significant recognition for Anne Moreau, the great-granddaughter of the official painter Moreau de Tours, who follows in the footsteps of her paternal and maternal ancestors, whose paintings she keeps. "I grew up in this environment. When I was very young, I had a drawing board with gouache," Anne Moreau told CL in 2019. For this artist who pursued Applied Arts, Decorative Arts, and Fine Arts, painting is a passage like a journey: "The act of discovery is essential, more than the destination." It mirrors her journey and encounters.

In 1978, with her professional photographer husband, they bought a barge to navigate the Seine, the Marne, and the Saône, and for fifteen years, they were artist-lock keepers. "A lock is a passage like the frame of a painting, a way to move from one valley to another, from one country to another."

Even the support she uses today, geotextile canvas, facilitates the transportation of her large paintings. First exhibition in 1977 In 1977, it was Pierre Robin, a specialist in African art and eternal globetrotter, who opened his Parisian gallery for her first exhibition. She then went on to exhibit in Florence, Lisbon, and now New York, where the exhibition of ten of her paintings coincides with the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Hudson Bay by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, which he named New Angoulême, now New York.

A nod to history for Anne Moreau, who considers her art as a "terra incognita" to be explored and mapped "if one knows how to listen or look." For those who wish to discover her works in a simple setting, there is a place off the beaten path of art and its codes where Anne Moreau exhibits some paintings. It is at Nicolas Wisser's, a market gardener in Bioussac, also a great traveler who traveled, before settling down, part of France in a caravan and on horseback. As if the art of travel served as a bridge.