DENIS PRIEUR  
through the eyes of art critics

— Gaston Diehl

Professor of Art History and Art Critic (Excerpt from Ideart 23 & Denis Prieur Catalog 1998)

 

(...) Over the years, Denis Prieur has indeed continued to display his quiet determination, his respect for the past insofar as he shows himself attached to reality. However, it is a reality that he seeks in the depths of himself. It is a reality linked to the daily, to lived experience that he explores, jostles, manipulates, and reconstitutes according to his human and how generous sensitivity. With as much humility as with a demanding passion, he builds, structures this intimate space found again by emphasizing with care, with a loving impulse, the relations between chromatic harmonies in a constant concern to make the most of the riches inherent in the material. A double life in which our friend has totally invested himself.

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— Jean Clair
Academician, Art Critic (Excerpt from the Denis Prieur Catalog 1998)

 

"My attention was drawn, at the Albert Lœb gallery, to a painting by Mr. Denis PRIEUR that

was on display there. I was immediately seduced by the evident plastic qualities of this still life with fish heads, rare in an artist so young. A visit to his studio confirmed my first impression."

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— Lydia HARAMBOURG
Art critic and art historian (Excerpt from Présence de la Peinture Française 1974-2016 French Association for the Arts)

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“In Denis Prieur's work, form and spirit, matter and imagination unite for a harmoniously executed painting. (...) He has never given up constructing his canvases from a direct observation of what surrounds him. (...) Peremptorily simplified, the composition uses pure colors, of which he tells us that each has its own language according to the painter. He exalts a flamboyant palette, reds, blues subdued with white to obtain the hues of light. The colors remain present thanks to a maximum of saturation and harmonize through modulation, and through the stylization of the line. Shadow itself has become a color while light represents its own clarity. The light unifies the space, which has become a palpable presence. (...) It is in full awareness of the artist's possibilities and the demands of the art of his time in the continuity of that of the past that Denis Prieur reaches the maturity of his painting.”

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— Jean-Baptiste Sécheret
Painter (Excerpt from L’infaillibilité artistique selon Jean-Baptiste Sécheret August 2021 Hannah Starman for Arteez)

 

"I also have contemporary works. For example, drawings by Denis Prieur. I have a drawing by him that is equivalent, and I weigh my words, to a very beautiful drawing by Cézanne. Denis Prieur is the essential contemporary, to repeat the formula. Denis Prieur is a miracle, it's like having been around Degas, or Tintoretto, or Veronese. That drawing is in that lineage. Also an infallibility of drawing, like Ribera, like Degas. There is an infallibility in painting. In relation to Denis Prieur, I always feel like a little boy."