Romuald Crampe

Romuald Crampé was born in Sélestat (Alsace - France) in 1962. Attracted since by the visual arts, he made Beautiful Arts in Mulhouse. His professional course starts in the field of decoration. During ten years, installed in Paris, he works in this sector. After returning to his native Alsace, the déco leaves, little by little, place with painting. Since 1998 artistic activity becomes priority and for seven years he devoted all its time to its true passion. Romuald Crampés’ animalist portraits have a common point: the glance of the subject. Starting point and nerve centre of his work, he fixes that which is opposite and one is grabbed by the intensity of the pupils which seem to dilate, a true feeling to play the cat and the mouse! If their author is of a discretion of cat-like, it is for better speaking to us through its achievements. Then, the best of things to be made opposite its bestiary, it is to plunge in the exotic universe of the fabric and to listen to what it murmurs you! To strengthen, coat, wax, scrape, scratch: the ritual is repeated, immutable, though moving... It is thus only one time the fabric of flax worked to acquire the tactile and visual richness of the skin or the leather, which emerges at Romuald the desire to place there a subject. "... For me, the support and the subject are supplemented completely. The realistic or photographic aspect of painting does not interest me. My work is more in interpretation, to seek to reach a dimension which is beyond immediate reality... ". Matter and drawing thus combine in subtle camaieux the brown ones, ochres and blacks, revealing with that which contemplates the fabric a share of the mystery that the painter sought to bore and of which the key perhaps resides in the negligible difference between the verbs "to see" and "to look at". To surprise, to astonish, to captivate those which discover its tables, it is there which resides the pleasure of the painter, who does not like anything as long as to see the spectators of his exotic universe approaching the fabrics until daring the touch. Sylvie Arlabosse - Paris