Enthusiasts of aesthetics and beauty are currently delighted in our County of Nice. Following the new exhibition at the Cocteau Museum in Menton, it’s the Louis Nucéra Library that is offering a retrospective on Moretti, an artist who passed away in 2005.
More than 200 works by this artist, acquired by the city of Nice from his friend Georges Israël, are available for the public to admire.
Visitors to this library, an Agora of culture and thought, can discover or appreciate Raymond Moretti in this tribute to the artist. The exhibition will continue until February 26, 2013.
It invites us into the intimate world of this jack-of-all-trades genius. Here we mingle with his friends: Picasso, Cocteau, among others, and we discover the vast extent of his influence on the arts. Is he a painter, sculptor, illustrator, writer, or poet? Anyone who claims to know the answer would inevitably be mistaken, because Raymond Moretti is all of these at once. He illustrates books and offers us the finest posters of our Carnival, understanding that this event is above all a burst of light in the land of eternal spring.
The visitor will wander or rather roam, as he will go back and forth to this showcase, then return to the book where the portrait of Malraux is sketched, and then there will be book and poem illustrations where he becomes an accomplice of the author of beautiful versifications. Raymond Moretti is torn between religiosity and history in its most tragic chapters. Yet, is there a conflict between Masada with the sacrifice of the Essenes and the dark pages of the revolution? Is there not, in the interweaving lines, a message of hope and Faith, of a flame that will not be extinguished, and there, we find resistance, De Gaulle, and Malraux.
Moretti’s drawing is vibratory, it’s jazz, it swings and sways. Raymond Moretti was very closely linked with this musical genre. In his studio at Villa Paradisio, great masters like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong came to greet this artist. Don Quixote by Jacques Brel, misunderstood in its time, was illustrated by Raymond Moretti. We conclude our evocation of this artist from Nice with a gouache where feminine beauty, that of women, is the essential rhyme of poetry, which ultimately fully characterizes Raymond Moretti. An exhibition not to be missed.
T Jan.
