Xavier LORETTE
Originally from Tourquen, on the Belgian border, Xavier LORETTE, 48, has had his very good pencil stroke since his earliest childhood.
He owes it to his father, an amateur painter.
It remained to cultivate this gift to make it his profession.
First imitating the great Flemish and Dutch masters, he began studying plastic arts at the St Luc school in TOURNAI (Belgium).
"At the start of the 1970s, I did lots of odd jobs as I wandered around", he recalls, "Passing briskly from the hotel industry in Black Africa to the hushed libraries of ocean liners, whether in the Middle East or even in the Mediterranean Basin".
From his escapades, he brings back incomparable scents, smells and lights.
His stays cross names of capital or big cities like MILAN or LONDON.
"I was fired from everywhere by refusal of authority. It is my demand for freedom."
His meeting with Guyonne, his future wife, will allow him to devote himself entirely to painting.
From then on, he settled down near Belgium to give free rein to his imagination and became a "Mobile Traveller".
The influence of Guyonne on his painting will be essential.
The female nude is omnipresent as is the fantastic dimension of her childhood dreams. The imaginary is always extracted from the real.
We drown in the depths of a lagoon, we bathe in the score of an orchestra conductor beating time in the ocean, we lose ourselves in the confusion caused by bodies, but even more so by female faces, so many pensive expressions.
"I am a painter from the North" he claims! "I feed on its landscapes, its culture and the charms of its shores."
To be humble to better understand his art, to question himself, to submit to public criticism, to all this Xavier LORETTE cannot be hermetic.
"I feel a weariness when I don't paint!".
