5 feet 3 inches

A student of Wogensky at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, Sautour-Gaillard saw his first woven cardboard created in 1971 by the Legoueix workshop (a collaboration that continued thereafter), He then went on to produce a number of monumental projects, the most spectacular of which was "Pour un certain idéal" (For a Certain Ideal), a series of 17 tapestries on the theme of the Olympic Games (now housed in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne). Initially close to lyrical abstraction, in the 1990s the artist created cartoons based on assemblages of decorative motifs, textures, and figures, apparently superimposed and unified in the weaving.   "La voix du reliquaire" (The Voice of the Reliquary) shows how close the artist was in his early days to the lyrical abstraction of artists such as Soulages and Schneider. Transposed into wool, we find the effects of gestures and even drips characteristic of the artists of the "lyrical flight" movement, in an extremely limited color palette.   Bibliography: D. Cavelier, Jean-René Sautour-Gaillard, la déchirure, Lelivredart, 2013, reproduced on p.163