"I simply want to organize and make evident, by bringing it to the light, a coherent world, sensitive, a reflection and a screen of the riches that reach me through the ‘prism' of my sensations," wrote Maurice Estève, who is being honored by Ceysson & Bénétière this September. This exhibition brings together an exceptional collection of works from all periods of his life, oils, watercolors, and charcoals, to showcase a remarkably coherent artistic journey, one that is both faithful to itself and continuously renewed. Estève never stopped painting against the certainties of his time. Indifferent to schools of thought, resistant to collective affiliations, he created his own language: an organic abstraction, free and intuitive, born from an inner vision carefully nurtured. Far from any dogmatism, his painting moves "blindly," in a slow and demanding dialogue with the material, where color, form, and light emerge in one single movement, without sketching or premeditation. Each canvas is an adventure, a metamorphosis: "I never use a sketch; I paint directly on the canvas, without prior drawing. The color organizes itself as the forms do.’’

From his early figurative works influenced by Cézanne, Fouquet, Courbet, and Corot, to the gradual liberation of form and the conquest of color as a material, each piece marks a step in this quest for an inner order, a "light offered" after an intimate struggle. The compositions, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative—human figures, landscapes, still lifes, reinvented from memory, become motifs of a world reorganized by the gaze, where the drawing structures and the color gives it life. For Estève, art was neither a decorative exercise nor a spectacular claim, but a form of knowledge, a revelation: "It is still my works that enlighten me, that give meaning, life, and weight to things that, without them, would remain unknown to me," he said.

The diversity of the media exhibited reminds us of how essential drawing and watercolor were for Estève as realms of genuine experimentation, independent and not merely preparatory studies.

The black and white of charcoal or the transparencies of watercolor partake in the same effort to capture a transformed reality, the same vital breath.

Estève said he wasn’t seeking to be "in tune with the aims of contemporary painting," but rather to "prove to himself that he could create work with which he could live." Painting, for him, was an existential necessity: an effort for clarity, a work of silence, a way to "deny the night, deny death," as he confided after the death of his wife, Nelly. A major figure in post-war French painting, Estève built his career outside the noise, far from the clamorous avant-gardes, preferring slow maturation over manifestos. Rejecting boldness for its own sake, he did not believe in novelty as an absolute value but in "the nuance of a vision," born from the alliance between tradition and unique sensitivity. His work, founded on patient observation, doubt, and lived sensation, continues today to touch with its luminous intensity, its secret musicality, and its ability to bring forth, from the surface of the canvas, a world both profound and familiar.

Silent and sovereign, Estève leaves us a body of work that holds, in its entirety, in the fertile tension between impulse and measure, color and form, rigor and tenderness. A body of work that, against categories, a rms that art is first and foremost a matter of humanity.