H4B
Biography
Henri de Quatrebarbes, H4B by his artist name, learned to paint from a very young age by taking evening classes for many years at the Atelier du Bac in Paris.
Since then he has continued to paint, exploring all techniques and mediums. His first exhibition dates back to 1977. He was living in India at the time and devoted the monsoon period to preparing the exhibition of 35 works that he presented at the Alliance Française in New Delhi.
His abstract paintings are the result of an accumulation of visual sensations captured in everyday life. Sometimes he is simply attracted by details of superimposed planes, bursts of light or the magnification of unusual images. His eye is permanently magnetized by the light that plays on shapes and colors.
All the varied sensations accumulated over the course of these images form notes, and lead him to compose his paintings as a writer would for a novel or a composer for music. The fragments of image or atmosphere are transposed onto the canvas in search of a vibration between color and light.
Translation, transformation, interpretation, constitute the milestones of a practice whose goal is to convey an emotion through the language of color, composition and matter.
His creative project navigates between an exercise in meditation on the purification of lines and emptiness, tempered by a vital flow expressed by scratches, drips and skids of the brush on the canvas.
These two universes, like water and fire, define the benchmarks on which H4B's work is woven with a permanent back and forth from one to the other, like the reflection of an inner world in replica of the world around us.
Deeply rooted in the contemporary world, this work, on the edge of abstraction and figuration, fits well into the codes of today's society. Henri de Quatrebarbes has had numerous exhibitions in Paris, in the provinces and abroad for over 40 years.