Michel Barthelemy

Michel Barthélemy is born in 1943 in a small town located in Belgian Lorraine. He teached plastic arts during thirty-five years in Arlon, in the south of Belgium. His first paintings were already a part of the fantastic realism movement, an inner need from what some abstract and expressionist experiments have failed to distract him. His artworks are realistic in a way that it is based on an evocation of objective reality. Every single staged element might be easily identified. However, as we travel, we will not be able to meet these places, in the streets, nor some of these characters. Nonetheless all of this really exists, not in the world of our ordinary perceptions, but in this inwardness where the feeling takes advantage of the the perceived. We are in a fantastic universe, both familiar and strange. This trend is wearing in his work two complementary aspects which appear one by landscape, the other by portrait. By Landscape, it demonstrates his delight about the constant power of creation of nature. It feels mostly attracted to places which are open to immensity, which “remind to man his verticality”. Portraits are sarcastic when they are staging proud characters and they become suddenly tender in front of human being who shares a common passion for their artwork.