Max Fournol

MAX FOURNOL (France, 1946)
"Petite musique de nuit".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right area. Titled and signed on the back.
Measurements: 65 x 81 cm; 85 x 101 cm (frame).
In this painting of disturbing and poetic atmosphere, the artist constructs a landscape of openly surrealist character dominated by a dark and densely cloudy sky, whose heavy tonality envelops the scene in a sensation of strangeness and temporary suspension. In the center of the landscape, a bed in the middle of the open space introduces a deliberate break between the everyday and the dreamlike. From it emerge and disperse in the air a series of papers that seem to fly. The composition establishes a contrast between this central focus and the human figure on the far right of the scene.
Max Fournol is a French painter trained at the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, an institution where he developed his artistic training and where he later also worked as a teacher. His professional career combines art teaching with a sustained pictorial practice, developed mainly since the 1970s.
Fournol's work is part of an aesthetic territory close to surrealism and symbolism, currents that allow him to explore poetic, psychological and narrative dimensions of the image. His compositions usually integrate silent landscapes, everyday objects displaced from their usual context and solitary human figures, elements that generate atmospheres charged with ambiguity and evocation.