Mannerism, the first international aesthetic, blurs the codes of the Renaissance and appears as a nebula where, sometimes, a star lights up; Antoine Caron, found at Écouen this spring, gives an effective demonstration of this.
Searching for Picard painter Antoine Caron amounts to accept asceticism. Born in Beauvais in 1521 - died in 1599, probably in Paris. Little documentation, therefore, a relatively restricted proven painting, a graphic corpus often uncertain, fruit of comparisons and relative analyses, interpretations by the chisel or the tapestry, post-mortem, a stained glass window, a signature on a painting in the Louvre, finally; this is mostly what time has preserved of Antoine Caron. And yet, we can guess from these clues that he was one of the masters constantly employed by the Valois. And even by each of them, from François I, for whom he worked in Fontainebleau in the Galerie d'Ulysse, to Henri IV, Valois by Margot... Antoine Caron participates in the decorations of the sumptuous life of a century where the tortuous invention seems to echo the political troubles. And, indeed, Caron is familiar to us through a massacre, that of the Truimvirate, a cruel episode of republican Rome, which illustrates all the textbooks on the page of the St. Bartholomew. Strange painting, signed, dated: acid tones, elongations, perspective to match, tribute paid to Rome by the representation of its memorable monuments... To approach Caron, however, is to sink into invention, cadenced by a rhythmic life, a little like a painted transposition of the symbolic rigodon of Céline, to approach, finally, a high conceptualization of Art.

Extract of the article of Vincent Quéau published in the N°106 of the magazine Art Absolument. Publication on May 17, 2023.

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