Yves Elléouët

Biography

Yves Elléouët has been drawing, painting, and writing since his early years. He graduated from the École Technique des Arts Appliqués in Paris in 1953. At 23, in 1953, Yves met André Breton and his daughter Aube, whom he married a year later. Seeing surrealism as "the only watcher leaning on the guard towers of past and future centuries," the painter created an imaginative world, particularly in his 1958 cement frescoes, filled with mysteries and hybrid figures akin to primitive art. Animal-symbols, moon-signs, circles, and squares of magic take shape in ochre tones, earthy colors, and sometimes blue mixed with black, evoking night, its spirits, and transformations.

Yves Elléouët welcomed with joy other major "markers" of art and painting of his time. The works of gestural abstraction, or those of his friends Alexander Calder, Charles Lapicque, or Pierre Jaouën, influenced him much like the jazz standards he listened to in the studio, inspiring freedom and improvisation.

From 1961 to 1966, Yves worked as a designer in the "Label" department of the magazine Elle. In 1966, he and his wife left Paris for Saché in Touraine. The Calder-Davidson family helped them find a home and settle there. Yves was able to fully devote himself to writing and painting. In 1967, he published La Proue de la Table, a collection of poems illustrated by Alexander Calder, with Éditions du Soleil Noir.

Starting in 1968, he focused exclusively on writing his first novel, Livre des rois de Bretagne, published in 1974 by Gallimard, followed by Falc'hun. In 1980, his poems from Au pays du sel profond were published by Éditions Bretagnes, and in 1982, Tête cruelle was published by Calligrammes.

Exhibitions selected

2024 Le surréalisme. D'abord et toujours, Centre Pompidou, Paris
2011 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest
2009 Rétrospective, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Château de Tours
1996 Rétrospective, Hôtel de ville de Tréguier
1984 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Vannes
          Hôtel de ville de Quimper
1983 Musée de Morlaix
1981 Palais des arts et de la culture de Brest
1961 Exposition internationale du surréalisme, galerie Schwartz, Milan
1959 Exposition internationale du surréalisme, galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris
1958 Galerie de la Cour d'Ingres, Paris