ALAIN SENEZ

ALAIN SENEZ was born in 1948 in Paris. When the family moved to Provence, he was accepted at the art school in Aix at the exceptionally young age of 14 on the strength of an outstanding talent. In 1965, he won the Granet prize for painting and the following year the Granet prize for sculpture. In 1966, he moved back to Paris to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. There he won numerous prizes: for monumental painting, monumental sculpture, architecture and perspective. At the age of 19, he taught perspective drawing in the school of architecture. In 1968 he won the Grand Prix Rocheron for landscape painting, as well as the Fortin d’Ivry prize awarded by the Institute of France. In the same year he was favourite and deuxième logiste in the coveted Prix de Rome, attracting an enthusiastic notice from Balthus.

Senez’ creative activities were interrupted by military service, which he spent in Africa. On his return, he moved north again to Paris in 1974 and then on to Belgium, where he immersed himself in a study of the techniques of the Flemish masters. This basic research, which spanned several years, brought him to examine the very foundations of Western figurative art. He set himself the task of acquiring an intimate knowledge of both the composition and the techniques of the great painters of the past. In his paintings there remains a clear, if oblique acknowledgement of his debt to past masters, such as Corot and Manet, though Senez’ compositions typically blend imaginary elements with precise observation and a powerful ability to evoke a strong sense of place.

Alain Senez has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2002 and was a major participant in the gallery’s theme exhibitions, Roma (2003), Lair of the Leopard: twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa’s Sicily (2005), Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world by twenty five painters today (2006), РОДИНА: contemporary painters from the West winter in Russia (2008) and This twittering world: Contemporary painters celebrate TS Eliot's Four Quartets (2011). Since the early 1970s he has held numerous exhibitions in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain and Switzerland. One person exhibitions with Francis Kyle gallery in 2004 and 2008.

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