"Erxy", 1963 Oil on canvas Signed, dated and located on the back of the canvas "Milano 1963"

Dimensions: 80 x 100 cm Confronted with Arabic writing and the Koran, ancient Latin runes and cave paintings, Bernard Quentin experiments with the word, letters and language.

The canvas, of large dimensions, is left raw; the black letters of the Latin and Arabic alphabet develop and spread over its surface. They burst out, like a tangle of words whose meaning has been lost: only the shape and the symbol of the letter interests Bernard Quentin.

In 1940, Bernard Maurice Quentin moved to Paris. He studied painting, sculpture and architecture at the School of Decorative Arts and the School of Fine Arts in Paris. After the Second World War (during which he took part in the resistance), he became acquainted with Picasso. From 1946, he became a regular figure in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who mixed philosophers, poets, writers, painters, sculptors, actors and musicians of existentialist, surrealist or other persuasion, and who constituted, at that time, the nucleus of the Parisian intelligentsia.

Friend of Pierre Dimitrienko, Serge Rezvani and François Arnal, he is marked by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. The first, whom he met in 1945, made him lean towards abstract expressionism. The second leads him to abstraction, which earned him his first ideograms and stenografittis. In 1947, during a trip to the south of France and Italy, he discovered the cave inscriptions of the Valley of Wonders, affirming his initial interest in the poetic spontaneity of all imaginary ideograms and other hieroglyphs. In the 1950s, he collaborated with Le Corbusier on architectural projects.

He travels to Brazil, Peru, Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as to Scandinavian countries, including Lapland, where he studies local runes. From 1952, he worked on much larger formats, during which his graphic signs lost their geometric aspects and once again developed a gestural dynamic. After 1980, Bernard Quentin made a series of paintings in which the evocations of crowds are intertwined with scripts and graffiti. Bibliography : . Article "Bernard Quentin", October 31, 2011, Oxford Art Online. Robert Lebel (quote by Bernard Quentin), "First Assessment of current art", Paris, Editions of the Black Sun, 1949. Jacques Dopagne, Michel Broomhead, "Knowing the art of Quentin's excess", Paris, 1986 Museums: . In Paris: National Museum of Modern Art-Pompidou Center; National Center for Plastic arts .

In France: Cantini Museum in Marseille; museum of fine arts in Nantes; museum of modern and contemporary art in Saint-Étienne Exhibitions: . Collective exhibitions: in 1947, the second Salon of New Realities, Salon Comparisons and Salon de Mai; exhibition "On Four Walls", Babylon gallery, 1953; "The New School of Paris", 1952; "50 years of abstract painting", Creuze-Balzac Gallery, 1957 ... . Personal exhibitions: Mai gallery, 1957, Stadler Gallery 1957; Quatre Saisons Gallery, 1959; Larcade Gallery, 1978; "Quentin 1948-1963",1984 and "Memoir" 1900, Michel Broomhead Gallery; "Writings and Masses, Works from 1947 to 1963 and Writings and Cut-Outs, Totems, Recent Works", Arnoud Gallery, 1991…