Victor Gray UK — 1945

Born in England in 1945, Victor Gray studied at the Beaux-Arts in Hastings and London before settling in the Toulouse region at the age of 30. Influenced in his early days by the painters Peter Stroub, Robyn Denny, and John Hoyland, Victor Gray very quickly developed his own style characterized by great formal freedom, using brush and knife to create shapes and materials. If in the first part of his career, his work was dominated by the expressiveness of colors, his current work is more refined and more symbolic. This is evidenced by his evocations of religious art through the use of formal elements such as the hanger, the curve or the arc. Victor Gray takes care to keep unpainted spaces on all his canvases. He does not consider the blank canvas as a simple support but as part of the work, since the white canvas already reflects the light. He says about it: "I always choose the canvases with a sickly attention. And before putting the pencil or the brush on it, I have scruples about damaging it. Then you have to bring it back into balance."