A man from the Nord département, Pierre-César Lagage was born at Croix, near Lille in 1911, and died at Seclin in 1977. After studying at the Roubaix art school, he established his personality creating landscapes influenced by Flemish painters of the 17th and 18th [La version d’origine cite deux fois le XVIIe siècle] centuries, especially Van Eyck with a marked liking for a certain austerity.

In 1937, he settled in Montmartre where he discovered Parisian artistic life. After being liberated from a camp in eastern Prussia in 45, his painting moved towards a simplification of forms, made with vertical and horizontal lines, while remaining figurative.
The end of the 1940s directed him towards geometric abstraction that brought him close to Fernand Léger, but which became more complex in forms, while expressing a certain violence.
From 1951, diagonal lines more and more often took a place in his compositions like the curves ad figures emphasized with dark contours, such as in “composition 1951”. Curves and concentric circles become common from 1953, to occupy an important place while smoothed painting became thicker with impasto, or more granular.

His technique evolved towards compositions in the form of mosaics around 1955-1956, and enabled him to win the Prix Lissone in 1957 in Italy while many exhibitions of his work were organized abroad, in Europe, Japan and Brazil.
Always searching, his compositions evolved towards darker colours and more broken up arrangements from 1962, and impasto on canvases that suggest tree bark.
Towards the end of his life, ill health forced him to stop painting and he destroyed a large number of his figurative works. An independent painter in the margins of fashions and movements, Pierre-César Lagage was always an artist permanently reconsidering his art, in the solitude of his studio, to create an oeuvre marked by true strength and totally different and original.

Patrick-Gilles Persin