FOREWORD

“What I am seeking..... is at once its inner coherence, its intelligibility, and its relationship to the outside.” Paul Andreu. the architect is an artist in everything but name. Having spent over 50 years of his life creating major public buildings and institutions from pure pencil sketches, Paul Andreu is returning to the power of drawing as a creative process.

“Explorations” is his first fine art series, in which he dwells on the fundamental essence of drawing as an action, exploring the relationship between the basic media of graphite and wood pulp on a macro level, and in the process creating non-representational pieces with a graceful strength that echoes that of his architectural conceptions. In the same way that Jackson Pollock painted about painting, so Paul Andreu draws about drawing.

The resulting works are dynamic and forceful with a sculptural weight that belies their abstraction, as the variety of shades and markings create a structure of textural form which seems to at once emphasise the physicality of paper pulp itself, and also to create depth and movement within the two-dimensional space.

Tertiary markings, demonstrating the means of their production, create sweeping echoes of the hand’s rhythm across the image surface, sharp against soft shading. Hard pressed pencil lines become shimmering roads and bridges of silvery graphite, grounded in the soft landscape of the fibrous paper.

As in the design of a building, where the final result is removed by a number of physical processes from the original visualisation of the architects' concept, so too is the viewer here divorced from the original image through the processes inherent in the creation of these works. In this way, Paul Andreu makes “Explorations” into the origin and essence of the creative process as an art form.

- Elisabeth de Brabant

About the Artist

Paul Andreu, born in 1938 in Bordeaux, grew up in France and studied Engineering and Architecture at Louis le Grand College, Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Throughout his life, Andreu had only one goal: to become an architect. It was a goal that, he says, one never reaches, but its elusiveness has inspired him to continue his studies in science and art.

“Neither the diplomas nor the academic distinctions will really bring you closer to [becoming an architect].,” says Andreu. [Though] passion, desire, and work of course, will undoubtedly help.” Andreu worked for almost forty years in the industry of Airport Design to achieve his goal. He worked as Chief of Construction on the Orly International Airport and Le Bourget Airport and conceived and supervised the construction of most buildings of the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. He also worked as Director of Design and Architecture on various international airport terminals in Abu Dhabi, Jakarta, Cairo, Dar-are Salam, and Shanghai. “I have loved designing these buildings, which have no historical functional reference, but which are, like so many others before places of passage, symbolic and singular, umbilicus.”

But, as Andreu resists confinement to one specific category of architecture, he worked to broaden his horizons. Among projects intended to expand his expertise were the Sea Museum in Osaka, a gymnasium in Canton, the Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai and, most profoundly, the Grand National Theatre of China in Beijing.

Since ten years ago, Andreu has published four books. To write had been one of Andreu’s many long-standing aspirations. “If I still had the capacity of it, I would even study mathematics again,” he says. “I believe my experience as an architect would make their infinite structures and developments more accessible to me.”