Born in 1950 near Reims, Patrick Baillet lives and works in the Marne. Largely self-taught, he began painting at the age of twenty-two before joining the painting studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in Reims from 1975 to 1977. Those years—spent in dialogue with art history, the great European museums, and encounters with significant artists—opened his eyes to contemporary painting and decisively shaped his practice.”

“Baillet works in his house-studio, a generous white space with a grey floor marked by his colours. He paints close to the ground, sometimes walking across the territory of the outstretched canvas. After many years working in oils, he now plunges his brushes into pigments combined with acrylic mediums, shellac, and other repurposed industrial materials—then the gestures begin. He circles canvases that are stretched on their frames; he walks, he crouches, holding in one hand the pot of his colour mixture and in the other the brush that obeys eye and hand alike. The formats are often very large, and the relationship between surface and body becomes essential.”

“Often inspired by travel, crossings, and the small details of life, by light and by the elements of Nature, he transposes the landscape rather than depicting it.”