Biography

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 de 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 and was favourite and runner-up in the Prix de Rome, attracting enthusiastic notice from Balthus.

Senez' creative activities were interrupted by military service, which he spent in Africa. On his return, after a spell of teaching in the south of France, he moved north again to Paris in 1974, and thereafter 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, from Titian to Renoir, via Delacroix to Turner. In his newest paintings there remains a clear, if oblique acknowledgement of his debt to past masters, for instance Corot, 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 spring 2003 theme exhibition, Roma he also participated in 2005 to Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily and in 2006 to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty five painters today . First London one-person exhibition 2004.

Alain Senez

The distinguished French painter Alain Senez consistently demonstrates the bravura technique applied to an extraordinary wide range of subjects for which he has been celebrated in numerous exhibitions, principally in Belgium and also France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

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 age of 14 on the strength of an outstanding talent. In 1966 he moved back to Paris to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. There he won numerous prizes for painting, sculpture, architecture and perspective. At 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 Institut de France and in the same year was favourite in the Prix de Rome, attracting an enthusiastic notice from Balthus.

As a graduate with flying colours of the exacting disciplines of traditional art education practised in France (achieving the coveted position of second Logiste in the Prix de Rome for painting) Senez acknowledges his deep debt to masters such as Corot and Manet. Tempering his broad, romantic vision is a very contemporary, specifically a very European sensibility, expressed, for instance, in the way in which he effortlessly blends imaginary elements with precise observation and a powerful ability to evoke a sense of place.

Frequently it is classical architecture which provides the framework for Senez' compositions: an archway giving on to a courtyard or garden, a room filled with light from an unseen source. The device of a window may be enriched by the presence of a further dimension: walls bear the traces of other paintings, now faded, suggesting a different time. Between one past and another there is a human figure or a statue or sometimes an animal, as if these complex scenes are haunted by a past existing in several layers.

The power of Senez' imagery is crucially backed up by his technical mastery. Brilliant chiaroscuro effects, rich surfaces enlivened by feats of trompe l'oeil are all the more effective for belonging to a seamless, flowing whole. It comes as no surprise, for example, to discover that the artist no longer uses traditional paint tubes but prepares and mixes his own pigments directly.

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