A propos

Alain Le Chatelier paints because everything stimulates his eye,
everything finds a place on his canvas down to the minutest detail.

Beginnings

Alain Le Chatelier was born on January 12, 1952 in Khénifra, a small town in Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains. There, he enjoyed six happy years of a childhood infused with a bouquet of North African colors and fragrances.

From 1960 to 1971, change of scene. He moved to Brussels where he discovered the enchanting pictorial culture of Flanders: The Primitives and the sensual abundance of Baroque painting.
In the 70s he took up a serious study of graphic arts at Met de Penninghen and les Beaux-Arts in Paris.
He experimented with engraving and etching, paint miniatures, illustrations in free-lance, and belonged to a theatre troupe as actor and stage designer.

Alain Le Chatelier

In 1986 he lived for a year in Salvador de Bahia, renewing memories of hot climates and a palette of asserting colors.

Three years later he took a traditional fresco course in the Tuscan town of Arezzo. He designed and completed interiors murals (in the town halls of the XI° and the XIX° arrondissement in Paris), theatrical decor and costumes (Monsieur Chasse by Feydeau, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac), numerous outdoors murals (Marseille, Fougères in Ille-et-Vilaine), interiors decoration (Château de Pruniers in Vienne, Château d’Avesan in Gers, Château Morel in Chicago)

« In Brazil, as well as in the Caribbean, under inky skies cleansed with diluvian rains, he discovered the muggy intensity of the tropics, flamboyant red, and the entire palette of green from the deep jungle to the fugitive brightness of birds of paradise… »

Inspiration

For the past 30 years, Alain Le Chatelier has shown his work regularly in France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Caribbean island of St Barthélémy, and the United States—wonderful occasions to travel, meet new friends, be inspired, and return home to create with a new-found energy in his studio in Bérulle, a former rectory nestled in the shade of the large bell tower that presides over this small village in the Pays d’Othe, south-east of Paris.

Just outside is a garden of flowers and birds, then the forest a little further away, and beyond that undulating fields of wheat and colza that stretch to infinity. But when cold weather takes hold, adieu to mud and winter chills; it’s off to St Barth for Alain! Always with the same thirst…

Inspiration