Gérald Messadié

Gérald Messadié

(post mortem)

The boy with the owl

Paint on canvas 130 x 97 cm Born in 1931, in Cairo, and passed away in Paris in 2018. Gerald Messadié first became famous as a novelist, an essayist and an investigative journalist. He embodied the «conscience sacrilège», in Georges Henein’s expression, a poet of Egyptian origin just like him and whom he considered a second father.

Egypt played an important role in Messadié’s life: he opened an art gallery in Cairo to criticize openly the social postures of his time. It was in Cairo too that he met the surrealists and became close with them. Influenced by this artistic vision and by Caravaggio, Messadié kept working with figurative painting. His paintings shows his excellent knowledge of human anatomy and the singularity of his sensual and mystical imagination as well. Torn, or projected out of his secret world, every character is like a hieroglyph that the spectator discovers with the ebb and flow of his own perception, just like his creator.