THE ART SHOWROOM

Michel Le Goff at the Hydra Art Showroom

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Michel H.V. Le Goff, born in Paris, moved to the island of Hydra when in his early twenties. Keeping Hydra as his permanent base, Le Goff has also lived in London, Oxford, Florence and Australia.

Le Goff had his first exhibition aged only 20 at the Marble Arch Gallery, London. In this group exhibition, Le Goff showed a large triptych created in collaboration with a group of young Jazz musicians from Paris' Blue Note jazz club and London's Enfants Terribles. He created works of art simultaneously with the improvisation experiments of his jazz musician friends. These first works were influenced by the Lyrical Abstraction of his mentor George Mathieu using the technique of warming tubes of oil paint.

In 1972 Le Goff traveled extensively in the Far East. In Shinjuku, Tokyo Michel Le Goff was introduced to Japanese calligraphy; this will remain a dominant characteristic of his art from the eighties onward.

In the early eighties Le Goff worked on a series of abstract polychromatic sculptures he called "topoglyptes".

An interlude from abstract art followed with a series of figurative academic paintings produced and shown in Florence, Italy.

In the mid-eighties, after seeing the works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, and Dorothy Napangardi, Le Goff discovered Australian Aboriginal art. The undulating style of the traditional song lines in paintings of the great western desert was a wakeup call to Michel Le Goff sending him back to his original aims. He set about synthesizing the intellectual content of Lyrical Abstraction with these brilliant topographical Aboriginal compositions.

Anyone with some awareness of contemporary art can easily spot that Le Goff is strongly influenced by Australian indigenous art, like a few other abstract painters today in the West. Le Goff, however, has totally dissociated himself from Aboriginal technique which can involve painting with wooden sticks or toiling for days on end over a single canvas. By contrast, Michel Le Goff paints with spontaneity to a fast emotional tempo. His palette too is quite different to Aboriginal art as he shuns earthy colours in favour of a more vivid and playful contemporary chromatic expression. Speed, fluidity, energy and reflexive connectivity between the artist's hand and his brain, is the credo of Le Goff which exteriorizes itself in the celebration of the Curve.

Michel Le Goff at the Wollotuka School of Aboriginal Studies, Australia

"For Michel Le Goff, the Curve rules our universe."

Antipodean to minimalistic forms and intellectual content of expression, Michel Le Goff has recently been called the “baroque” of abstraction. He surely appreciates this as a deserved compliment; a fact quite understandable when one knows that the artist is an aficionado of deconstructivism in architecture and other areas of life.

To understand his art, we recognize that Le Goff is driven intellectually and artistically by the pictorial dilemma of determinism versus free-will and by randomness in composition. Le Goff came to the conclusion that the apparent randomness in his works is a complex seemingly inescapable disorder, specific to each creation, resulting in a “deterministic composition”, a never-to-be-repeated original. Nobody could manually copy any of his paintings.

Le Goff has coined the term "Kymatic art" to describe what he paints when he celebrates with his brush; Music, Complexity, Uncertainty and above all, the "élan vital" underlying everything. This, despite the fact that some philosophers maintain that there is no such thing as the obvious "élan vital": the force animating the cosmos which we haven't yet put into a beautiful simple equation as a Theory of All Things. Le Goff is of the opinion that we shall not be able to put this equation onto our teeshirt ever, for there is a fundamental incompatibility in the couple macro and microcosm. There is only one truth : complexity and curves. Meanwhile listen to the many "strings" symphony of our universe, in colour.

Having a critical eye for art, Le Goff is also involved in collecting early Old Master paintings but also owns fine nineteenth-century Greek paintings, some of which he has donated or placed on loan to Greek museums.

An unconventional personage Le Goff, true to his philosophy, is rarely seen around the cocktail circuit of gallery openings. His choice of Hydra as a permanent domicile answers to his intellectual orientation as well as his environmental views on living an authentic lifestyle.

The idea of showing permanently at the Art showroom in Hydra was conceived by a Swiss collector of Le Goff's work. The purpose of this exhibition space is to present a retrospective of the work of Michel Le Goff over a period of few years; starting from his early Lyrical Abstract compositions to his latest kymatic works.

Curiously, Michel Le Goff has not yet shown his work in France an an expression of strong disagreement with the political Leftist overtone saturating the French art scene for the last decades. Le Goff, also a Greek citizen, feels that he should show his affinity to the re-emerging countries of Europe and the Far-East which are fast pointing to the future of our global village.

Whenever present in Hydra, Michel Le Goff was and is always pleased to show more of his paintings at his atelier of Kaminia on the island.

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    Michel Le goff is the father of two sons; Alexandre, a champion fencer now in his thirties, living in Greece and Hadrian, just turning twelve in September 2008, living in Australia.
    Michel's first wife Dimitra, a beautiful Greek woman, was the owner of a small Hotel in Hydra. She is a very original and sympathetic realtor who gave "work" a more agreeable meaning.
    Michel's second wife, the Art Historian Raichel Le Goff, is an intellectually challenging academic with a very critical eye on art. She is the specialist of Philostratus and of "ekphasis" through the ages.