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French artist Frederic Monnet explores the physical discipline and spirituality of yoga in a his current exhibition of recent paintings titled “Postures of Yoga.”
Monnet, a native of Paris who has pursued his artistic work in Beaucaire, Provence, since 1996, is a specialist in paintings of the human figure. Making full use of the color palate and drawing upon his previous experience in sketching for the stage, his paintings use circles and spirals to create fragments of life and refined lines to depict the human body in postures at once dynamic and harmonious.
The current exhibition features some 30 paintings, including oils and works in gouache on paper, that were inspired by Monnet’s studies during the 1990s with the renowned French art professor Isabelle Morin. In portraying postures fundamental in the practice of yoga, the paintings capture the beauty of the human body—in some works as a sole form, in others as a ballet of figures—suspended in time and brought into harmony through the cycle of breathing.
“In affirming individuality—which forgets itself, to better rediscover itself—yoga is a universal element of future civilization,” Monnet explains. “It reunites the body and the spirit in a love of perfection, of harmony.
“I have discovered a commonality between these qualities and my desire to express a vital élan, a love for the act of creation but also for the realization of maturity. A challenge presents itself: to express a state of tension in a suspended moment of time,” he says.
Monnet’s search for artistic expression of these contradictions in the human condition—an art that provides an appreciation of the human form, in both its sensual and its objective beauty—finds an ideal medium in his paintings of “Postures of Yoga.” Precisely drawn lines and muted colors suggest the dynamism of figures portrayed in a visible cycle of respiration as they assume classic postures of the discipline.
A self-taught artist, Monnet began his career as a set painter for television, movies, and theater and a painter’s assistant working on mural frescoes. During the 1980s, he gradually moved away from commercial projects in order to pursue his own artistic work, participating in eight group exhibitions and staging more than 25 individual shows in New York, Paris, and a number of cities in the south of France.
His paintings cover a rich diversity of subjects, ranging from dancers and torreadors to landscapes and lovers. He first staged a personal show of paintings on the theme of yoga postures in Nimes in 1997, and selections of these works were presented in an exhibition staged last year at the Paragrammes gallery in Paris.
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