The artists behind the campus artworks

Roger Toulouse :

Roger Toulouse was born on Tuesday February 19, 1918 in Orleans. From 1933, he took painting classes at the École des Beaux-Arts of Orleans, then followed by architecture classes in 1935. At the École des Beaux-Arts, he won several first prizes and exhibited his first works in 1937.

From then on, he exhibited his works at several galleries and exhibitions, in France but also abroad. Through Max Jacob (1876-1944) with whom he was very close, he met several figures from the art world such as the German art collector and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the American poet Gertrude Stein or famous painter Pablo Picasso .

Following the Second World War, during which he was mobilized in 1940, his style changed to become more realistic and symbolist, with recourse to a less aggressive chromaticism. At the same time, the director of the Normal School of Teachers of Orleans offered him a position as a drawing teacher, a position he held for thirty-two years in parallel with his personal production and exhibitions.

From 1970, Roger Toulouse took an interest in hammered metal sculpture. His style evolved rapidly, the triangles very present in his pictorial work were replaced by more assertive and compact forms. By the mid-1970s, his sculptures became totally abstract and consisted of thick plates of hammered metal, articulated and orientable. The plates were cut according to simple, angular, vigorous geometric shapes. Tribute to Lavoisier, his sculpture on the campus, is clearly part of this stylistic evolution.

At the beggining of the 1980s, he began working with collage techniques and gave up teaching to devote himself entirely to his art, in which the white colour became more and more important. However, from 1992, white faded in favor of bright and vibrant colors, and his compositions were enriched with numerous figurative elements. Roger Toulouse will also produce collages in duller colors, obscured by the use of carbon black. Tired due to illness, he works very slowly. From June 1993, he adopts a last style: his compositions disperse, explode in a multitude of colored ribbons. It is the final stage of sixty years of painting.

Roger Toulouse died on September 11, 1994, from leukemia which had slowly weakened him for many years. Throughout his life, he alternated between several disciplines, from illustration to painting, through sculpture in wood and metal and poetry.

His relation to the artistic 1% :

Roger Toulouse will honor several public orders between 1976 and 1982, all of them were sculptures. He produced 17 artworks within the framework of the artistic 1%, including 16 for cities of the Loiret Department. In addition to the Tribute to Lavoisier, 3 other of his works are visible on the territory of Orléans Métropole.

Maurice Calka :

Maurice Calka was born in 1921 in Lodz, Poland, before moving to Lille at the age of 3 with his parents. At the age of 16, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lille, where he was spotted by the director of the time, the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. The latter entrusted him with his first project in 1939, a monumental bas-relief for the press pavilion at the Lille Social Progress Exhibition.

In the fall of 1939, he successfully passed the entrance examination to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He shelved his studies during the Second World War to join the Free France Forces in 1942, smuggling the Spanish border into North Africa. Demobilized in 1945, he resumed his studies in Paris and won the Rome Grand Prize in 1950.

In 1954, he honored his first commission for urban art : a 12-meter-high freestone sculpture of a Lion of Judas in front of the National Theater in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He will also create several interior sets for this theater and his performance will be underlined by King Haile Selassie I. Returning to France, he worked with several architects and urbanists for the realization of various works, such as Xavier Arsène-Henry or Olivier-Clément Cacoub.

In parallel with his activities as an architect, Maurice Calka developed in the 1960s a passion for design. In particular, he will develop a whole range of desks, mainly in plastics, called Boomerang.

He died on August 25, 1999 in Paris at the age of 78. In 2003, the Center Georges-Pompidou acquired part of the Calka collection for its collection of Modern Art.

His relation to the artistic 1% :

In the early 1950s, the government introduced the artistic 1% obligation. Maurice Calka quickly specialized in this type of order. Between 1958 and 1996, he carried out some 47 to 49 public commissions in France, including the amphitheater of the Loiret general council in Orléans.

The architect is very attached to this device, because he believes that developing artistic elements within cities makes it possible to enrich the urban fabric, while raising citizens awareness for art. He will accordingly develop an urban art of his own, where sculpture must blend with architecture to link art and everyday life.

Jean-Marc Bustamante :

Born in Toulouse on June 4, 1952, Jean-Marc Bustamante explores in his artistic career different fields, such as photography, painting, sculpture and architecture. This architectural influence is clearly visible in his sculpture The Love Room, a hybrid work at the crossroads of the two artistic fields.

His first steps as an artist were marked by photography: he will collaborate with Denis Brihat in 1973 and then with William Klein in 1978. From this collaboration will emerge his first major works, in particular large color formats entitled Tableaux de la banlieue of Barcelona. In 1983, he met the sculptor Bernard Bazile, with whom he worked for 3 years. This period conducive to artistic exploration led him in particular to combine photography and sculpture in his creative process, which resulted in several installations.

His work, a mixture of both inspirations and reflections from photography and painting, is a questioning of forms resulting from modernist aesthetics. His paintings on plexiglass, in particular, explore the concept of light and color to describe visual landscapes with a strong poetic impact.

In addition to his artistic career, Jean-Marc Bustamante is also a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, of which he became director from 2015 to 2018. On December 7, 2016, he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in the painting section. From February 19 to February 20, 2021, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac exposed its exhibition “Les Grandes vacances”, an exhibition that could be virtually seen on the gallery’s website.

Jean-Louis Coursaget :

Born October 09, 1948 in Moulins, Jean-Louis Coursaget has been devoting himself to his artist career since 1972, after studying five years at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.

He distinguished himself a lot through public commission: in the Center-Val de Loire region alone, we can cite (not exhaustively) his tapestry for the Town Hall of Chartres (1985), the stained glass windows of the college of Louillard in the Eure-et-Loir (1989), or the frescoes in Town Hall of Villebarou in the Loir-et-Cher (2000).

He often uses both geometric and soft shapes in his work, in bright and intense colors. The Wool Wall created for the campus is not his first work based on a textile material : he is the creator of numerous tapestries, in particular for the Hôtel de Ville de Chartes (1985), the Ministry of Finance in Paris. (1987) or for the BEAC of Yaoundé in Cameroon (1988). He also made a tapestry for Les Invalides in 1977.