Jean Fusaro (1925) Bouquet Of Roses

Signed upper right. Framed. In this Bouquet of Roses, Jean Fusaro offers a work that is emblematic of his pictorial language, built on vibrant matter, light, and color. On a warm red?orange cloth, a luxuriant bouquet of roses blooms at the center of the composition. The thick petals, shaped by broad, generous strokes, unfold in a dazzling palette of luminous whites, golden yellows, intense reds, and tender pinks. Each flower seems caught in its vital surge, giving the painting an almost tactile presence. Around the bouquet, a yellow ceramic piece, a bowl of fruit, and a vase complete the scene, lending the whole an intimate, domestic atmosphere. In the background, nuanced tones of green and blue highlight the subject’s freshness, while on the right a vertical curtain draws the eye. Far from an illusionistic rendering, it is treated as a field of abstract colors—greens, blues, yellows—applied in thick impasto. Through its fragmented rhythm and musical verticality, it becomes a painting within the painting, adding to the work’s decorative poetry. Originally from Marseille, Jean Fusaro grew up in Lyon’s Croix?Rousse quarter. Raised in an art?sensitive environment—his parents introduced him early to theater, opera, and museums—he developed a keen and curious eye from childhood. Sunday museum visits became a family ritual, nurturing his taste for painting. From 1941 to 1946 he attended the École des Beaux?Arts in Lyon, where he befriended André Cottavoz, Jacques Truphémus, James Bansac, and Pierre Coquet. Together they founded the Sanziste group in 1948, holding their first exhibition in the chapel of the Lycée Ampère in Lyon. Sanzisme, a free and provocative movement, rejected the great currents of the 20th century—Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism—in order to invent a painting liberated from any school: a sensitive figuration between abstraction and reality. He received the Fénéon Prize in 1953, then the City of Marseille Prize in 1957, and became a key figure of the Lyon School alongside Jean Couty and André Cottavoz. His distinctive style—a light, fluid painting bathed in light and silence—won over a broad public in France and abroad. From the 1970s on, his works were regularly shown in Japan, marking the start of his collaboration with Galerie Tamenaga, which has exhibited and represented him in both France and Japan. His reputation also spread to Switzerland, Luxembourg, England, and the United States. Since the late 1990s he has been permanently represented by Galerie Estades in Paris, Lyon, Toulon, and Baden?Baden. Between 1990 and 2010, Jean Fusaro also turned to monumental art, producing a series of nineteen canvases for the church of Saint?Jacques?des?Arrêts in the Diocese of Lyon—an oeuvre as intimate as it is spiritual, deeply rooted in the French landscape and imagination. Now approaching his centenary, Jean Fusaro continues to paint, and a major retrospective exhibition has just been dedicated to him at Galerie Estades in Lyon.