The marvellous colour visions
Of Georges Sécan make me
Think that he lives in a terrestrial
Paradise not granted
To we mortals. Lucky man!!
My admiration
For his wonderful paintings
Is a modest homage
Paid by a poor “ Sunday painter”
Such is

Eugenio Montale 1969

Palazzo Reale has recently housed two art exhibitions of notable cultural and didactic importance: “ Contemporary Italian Sculptors” and “ Aspects of the Informal Paintings” with Georges Sécan's exhibitions we want to present not only an artist on whom all the official critics have bestowed hearty consents, but also a painter who feels very close to Italy.
Michel Tapié, the well-known Parisian critic, has defined Sécan’s subform a painting which passes over the meaning of the informal painting.

Paolo Pillitteri
Spokesman of the Art Enterprises

I know that I have found new and original accents for my painting, while searching in myself for another ego, savouring further the primordial, rudimentary and metaphysical layers of the subconscious, which are completely outside the usual of the vision of the psyche; layers from which we have been separated for millennia.  From this wonderful journey within enchantment – an imperceptible and almost abstract heritage – moved and disturbed, I derive my impulses, strange expressions and unseen visions from beyond myself.

Georges Sécan – 1941            

Historically speaking

Only through an axiomatic change – I mean within the current art, that is effectively post-dada – we set the basis of a tradition “autre”.

Perhaps centuries are needed in order to change the conditioning of the psycho sensory reflexes to which the greatest part of the amateurs as well as of the artists is  submitted. Hence, the confusion of  the” fashions” of which so many mediocre artists, that will be soon forgotten in the history of art, are able to take advantage of.

It is Sécan’s merit having created, even since 1942-43, works morphologically and lyrically “autres”.

Except for Hans Hofmann (for whom the term of abstract expressionism was created) and Mark Tobey (the first who introduced certain essential lessons from Eastern Orient into his works), I can’t see, beyond the aesthetical conjunction Gorky-Mirò, hardly anything in this direction, before the epic assertions of Fautrier, Still, Wols, Motherwell, Hartung, Mathieu, and of those who came after them: a lucky continuity which, little by little, will originate a tradition “autre”, formulating certain axioms of structures “autre” in sight of  a charm still “autre”, but naturally of an essentially artistic genre.

Luckily, Sécan exceeds the Informel because he signifies it artistically: as in “sisnificants of the Informel”, the artistically important word was undoubtedly that “significants”, which makes the objectified aesthetical decision spring out; all that because the Informel is an entirely neutral matter, so not less wholly disposable than the clay that the sculptor will have to mould as soon as it is taken out of the tub.  Nothing more and, above all – therefore – not a “style”…

How many foolishnesses this word has generated ( I feel responsible of its usage in art and in French language and so I have to denounce the abuses of language which unfortunately are always present!). Then, I am really happy when I happen to meet artists worthy of that definition like Sécan is: he reaches the heart of the problem and surpasses it in grand style.

Michel Tapié

In Sécan’s paintings it is certainly possible to diagnose, at first sight,  an anguished expressionism, vivified by strong informal trends, with spontaneous gestures and colours.  We certainly enter a whole chromatic adventure where the language ignores the support of meditated and recognizable geometries: the sight is an extremely high-graded explosion, which generates a magma stratified on the canvas into hallucinating and suggestive combinations. And suddenly we are in the very centre and in the core of mineral conglomerates, where the mystery of the amethyst and of the ruby originates.  But at a second and more accurate sight, we realise that the images veil an intimate and secret nostalgia: like the fumes of the Delphic priestess, the casualty of the forms claims an esoteric interpretation, hides and suggests mysterious figurations.  They recall those castles of clouds which tangle quarrelsome and sumptuous symbols in the high elysian spaces, pierced by jets.  Over those apocalyptic curtains, beyond the devastated screens, the hidden El Dorado shines forth: the dear and sweet land waiting for our steps and for our heartthrobs.

Domenico  Porzio

Georges Sécan always brings precious additions to the most intense moment of his art.  Sécan goes deep inside himself, he has above all listened to the most intimate impulses of his memory and of his heart.  In his paintings it’s almost always a rhythmic and musical wave of pure pictorial themes what is noticed at first sight.  Thus, in this expressive fervour, Sécan seems to us as a steady assertor of a painting devoted to the reaching of the deepest emotions that succeed in shaking the soul in order to lift it as high as the light.  In other words, with full modern instinct Sécan faces the world of vision, trying to draw from every content dealing with the temporal end emotional essence of a hidden presence, that his inspiration reveals, giving us its throbs and its inmost tremors.  In every painting of his, Sécan introduces us into the significant of an inner presence which vibrates in unison to the cosmos. 

Giorgio Kaisserlian

I met Sécan between 1933 and 1934, the period in which  Jacques Guenne directed l’Art Vivant.  Such a far period… Georges Sécan seemed too young to me, but he could already draw with fervour and paint with vehemence.  Among the ruins of my library, sacked during the occupation, I have recovered some sheets of Ingres paper covered with his sketches.  I have carefully saved the portrait of the poet Max Jacob, made in a sober and expressive way.  This portrait is the outline of the other kept in the museum in Quimper which fully restores the face of the last champion of the Western world, who died as a saint and a Christian martyr at Drancy, in a  camp.  While painting, Sécan starts a dialogue with the world forces. His particular interpretation of nature are not reflections of reality such as it falls under our senses and knowledge.  He contemplates the universe with his visionary, pure and fascinated eyes.  He enlivens the universe, makes it substantial, thanks to an elixir of life and makes it spiritual.  While most of his contemporaries considers the painting as an area covered with colours gathered according to a certain order, Sécan humanizes in dramatising it.  Chimeras seduce him.  Subjugated by the enchantment, like Dante’s hero, Sécan goes past the threshold of the infernal empire of the damned souls.  But the darkness which he enters are not able to break his rush. He crosses them resolutely and arrives at a heavenly realm flooded with light.

Waldemar George

There are hours in which the oppressing tumult of the modern world, its implacable scientific and mechanical progress, its quantitative proliferation, and its material triumphs leave us unsatisfied, full of doubts and secret nostalgia. Then we turn to the poets, to the musicians, to the painters who bring us that “ soul surplus” which already Bergson, the philosopher, invoked at the dawn of the century.  Among the artists who reveal us the infinite of the interior world, beyond the exterior immensity, the mysterious Georges Sécan is one of the most fascinating.  Sécan’s art is made in the likeness of man.  It doesn’t depend on any school, it doesn’t belong to any country, it stands above all.  In him we find a very elaborated mastery, achieved at first in France, then in Germany, that was  pursued and deepened with diligent firmness, during a thirty-year career; a simultaneous result of such a work is an extreme freedom, so that his painting integrates in a wonderful synthesis the realism and abstraction which captured even the attention of Paul Klee, with whom he has worked.  While painting, Sécan is often obsessed by music, because to him the tones of painting find a correspondence to the ones of music . This identification of those two arts which has been the concern of so many modern painters, particularly of the abstractionists, is also Sécan’s one. The ancient called “ the great Pan” the vertiginous cosmic force which men try to capture in order to use it with terrifying efficiency. The function of art, that a profound painter as Sécan has understood, consists in putting us  again in front of this infinite universe which envelops us so intimately and forgets our mean and temporary civilization, dazed by noisy illusion.  Hadn’t Delacroix already said : “ I am for the infinite against the finite”?  In Sécan’s art there is a resonance of his heart, an accent of the goodness and the love which make the colours and the forms vibrate with a secret rapture where we guess the hope, always living in man’s heart, on regaining the Paradise Lost of which Art will be forever the best witness and the last prophet.  Sécan’s work bears a new, deep witness amazingly luminous in the pure essence of paintings.

Raymond Charmet

Praised since over thirty years by so many critics, from Waldemar George to Charmet, to Chastel, Sécan’s painting may be sumptuous and moved by a rich and full inspiration, but we always perceive something stormy in these pictorial pages, a turmoil of the senses, but also an agitation of the intelligence; all this makes the painting loaded with substance, with warm colour and expressive violence.  Were I the manager of a big lyrical theatre, I would entrust him with the sins of a Wagnerian opera, not to limit his possibilities, but rather to let his inventiveness face with a maestro’s great opera: with turmoil of his paintings, Sécan would give a pictorial equivalent to that music, so magnificent and, at the same time, so tumultuous and dramatic.    In the pictures we have seen in several exhibitions, in Italy, during these years, we have noticed how rich his willingness is and we recognize how Waldemar George was right.

Marco Valsecchi

One of the most astonishing characters of contemporary painting, Georges Sécan is out of any artistic current, yet all the greatest critics have written about him; he can do a portrait from life in a few minutes and wander around the world for years, but from time to time he loves to live estranged from the world and from people, for months, in a far away hut  in the country, just to paint with those ghostly, mysterious colours of his, which he himself loves to prepare by secret alchemies.

Giorgio Mascherpa

Engagement of the painting and not engaged painting, the way we use to say. He who paints is always and constantly engaged: with a return, above all, a search, a discovery or a rediscovery.  Sécan belongs to that group of observers, also malicious, who carelessly pass from a very refined and authoritative portrait , to a more free and unbounded composition whose result can be felt at a distance indefinable in temporal terms.  His expositions do sign a date, and we remember them even if it is less easy for us to remember the diversified sinuosity of some titles happily ironical – “ Upsetting wait”, “ Sacrifice and vocation” and so on following this tone – apparently literary and marked  by the colours of his palette.  Those titles are not literature, they rather belong to the context of a Parisian sentimental and intellectual tradition that allows every possibility of escape and, above all, of returns as meditations about tonal values of endless variations of the spoken language characterizing the good painting.  The depth of his temperament is present like a constant line on which we can establish an itinerary of expressive manners confluent in what will remain forever the eternity of painting , or to be or to remain painting and, for the painter, to be and to remain a painter, whatever were the medium used, the world interpreted, the invention or the fancies thanks to which the legend or the halo of an artist gains colour and vitality.  Sécan is a painter and the sweet violence of his painting is nothing but a kind of free outlet and vibrating statement of all the liberties to which both civilization and culture have accustomed us.  Art is not made of words, but of silence and mystery.  Sécan interprets both of them and makes “ paintings” out of them.  Here is the reason why we use for him the expression “engagement of the painting” and not other different set phrases in fashion today.

Renato Giani

I think Georges Sécan’s dearest custom is the one about Italy.  He has travelled all around the world, he has an acquaintance  with many countries – because he is basically a cosmopolitan spirit, one of those men who unfortunately, are rare still today, who feel in harmony with the most various people – but, since I have  known him, many signs make me clear that he reserves to Italy a very particular place in his heart.  He lives in Paris, where he has studied painting, and where for many years he has been rightly considered a master.  Fully mastering the technique and yet never losing himself in virtuosity, he has an expert and immediate language.  His beautiful colours can reach the highest notes without uncertainties. In  his creative vehemence, Sécan is able to put straight off on the canvas thick and precious impastos, as well as to lay ethereal glazing; in a word, he admirably manages to weave a chromatic cloth which well favours the dynamism he gives the whole.

Mario Lepore

To the painter Sécan, art presents itself as a two-faced God: one of its faces reflects the external reality, the real: the other one reflects the inner reality, the spirit. ” In his painting - Jean Paul Crespelle writes in “ France-Soir –  there is the direct sense and the secret, deep one of that tragic world of his, which we can discover only going beyond the appearances”.   On his canvases, where the silence often finds place, we perceive a musical atmosphere, organized by rhythms . Sécan has something mystical.  A mystical like a contemporary man can be, pursued by the extemporariness of the manifestation of this civilization of machines of ours, which is fascinating but also boring.  I mean he is not a mystical by reaction, but by an inner necessity ,  and, consequently, with his particular acceptance, of the faster and faster passing of time.  Sécan himself wrote in “ Kunsthefte” in 1948: “ Farther and farther from himself, man goes farther and farther from the eternal laws which regulate and establish his own life, more and more unbridled in his fake and babelic   passions; this man has lost the notion  of the New – the sublime sense of life. “ Delacroix’s words reappear, as a warning:” For the great future imaginations, nature reserves more novelties to say about its creations, then the variety of things created by itself.” Sécan’s painting goes out of memory, purified of sensorial elements, which become a false fact, a totality of negligible elements.  The transfiguration goes beyond the possible, goes beyond,  goes past what is known . From here, the sense of novelty of his figurations , from here, the subtle charm transmitted by them to the observer, who is shocked by  them.  Sécan recreates for us a fantastic world in whose silence we expect the apparition of Truth; it becomes a message of another life: the revelation of mystery.  Writer and critic, musician for the holidays he allows himself at the piano.   A complete man from the intellectual point of view, he is very jealous of his own freedom, and, as a consequence, the relation with dealers result very difficult to him.  Sécan doesn’t want impositions or constraints.  Recently, he had accepted a commitment for a series of exhibitions in the USA, all was already decided: galleries, places, dates.  But one of his sudden resipiscences, the concern of being subjected to choices, to addresses, made him cancel everything.

Garibaldo Marussi

Sécan, the expressionist, doesn’t care what the foreign travellers, as to an ancient tradition, like to find in our country.  He rather looks for and finds, in Italy, the still enchantments  of the evening, the phosphorescent reflections of the upcoming storm, the solitude, the silence, in a word, the mystery.  He creates vehemently with thick and vigorous brush strokes which, in some pictures, may recall Vlaminck.  We may think of an authoritative, even irascible temperament and, on the contrary, he is a gentleman refined, modest, extremely well-mannered. 

Dino Buzzati

Some large paintings by Sécan – who at the moment lives between Paris and Milan – are on the way for New York.  His art is a deeply spiritualised one, responding to metaphysical solicitations following a musical order.  The technical mastery, which can structure itself in vast areas, even five and seven meters, proceeds harmonically with the moral engagement, the fervour of protest, the harsh quality of the alert.  Faces appear from the magma, as calling for more milder seasons; symbols and allegories drip with colour.  But the deciphering of contents doesn’t  mortify the intimate and autonomous reasons of painting, the voices of subconscious.  The series of sea-beds, the rescue of life, as it seems, look particularly happy.  We think about Pollock, but without despair, with hope, steady even in the ferine struggle between good and evil.  “ Fires of peace and war “was the title of the painting for which Sécan received U Thant’s congratulations, last year, at its presentation at UN.

Alberico Sala

I have been living for so long next to painters and various kind of artists, among whom several internationally famous, but I never happened, like yesterday afternoon, to see something which resembles very much a bravery.  I met in the street the painter Sécan in a joking mood: he stopped me on the pavement in front of a café. “ Please, don’t move” he ordered me “ There is a strange brightness in your revolutionary head!” I wasn’t completely still yet, that he was already sketching my portrait, on a casual sheet of paper, with swift and nervous pencil strokes; in no time, he drew in Ingres manner not only one, but two small portraits: the one with me standing up, smiling, the other a head with a serious, nearly sullen face.   He did all that with such a rapidity that the customers , come out of the café to see what was happening, were amazed.   How to define such a prodigy? I already knew that Sécan, in his exhibitions, likes sometimes to sketch the visitors, some of whom take advantage of it to have their portrait made by a great artist.  Like Matisse, Sécan feels it necessary to use always, at least, the pencil, as to set free the artistic impetuosity which modern painters perceive inside themselves more than in old times, considered also the different condition of life and thought.   However, I would never imagine that Sécan could be able – in such  short time – to draw two portrait do faithful as for physical appearance and character.  Maestro was coming back from one of his pilgrimage where for several days he had gone as to fulfil a voe and to satisfy the inner desire of solving, thanks to his brush, a magical perception which seemed to escape from him.  In Sécan’s painting we always feel the pathos of extraordinary emotions, which never find an end in themselves.  In fact, Sécan is an exception as a man, as well as an artist and he has an uncommon altruism.  Nowadays all artists, absolutely all of them, are launched and supported by galleries and merchants: Sécan doesn’t hide his indifference in this regard.  

Rinaldo Corti

In every painting of George Sécan ’s we can hear the tones of a fantastic symphony.  They are coloristica-musical compositions, particularly significant, which come from the impulses of his philosophical and human meditation, of his profound  and sincere nature of artist.   They are works corresponding to intense poetical vibrations, loaded with spirituality.  Sécan’s palette is violently expressive.

Franco Passoni

Sécan’s pictorial work shows itself very complex, so misguided or captured by the most appealing aspects, the spectator may happen to go far from the exact understanding of the leading themes which support it.  It shows itself, effectively, as an experience all devoted to realise  an acute expressive form, which doesn’t despise the violence of the gesture or the most violent chromatic excitation.  The nearly informal excitement of his gesture and the bright colour lifted to the highest tones, even if at a second sight, they all soften their contrasts into a dominating tonality, almost always thick and warm – may induce to classify Sécan’s pictorial work into neo-expressionism; but, in reality, thinking of these aspects which at first catch the spectator’s eyes – suggesting also a basic improvisation or impulses of a visceral nature - , we need to consider what is effectively essential in themselves.  In other words, as it’s always necessary, we need to go backwards along the path followed by the artist, in order to succeed in recognizing, slowly, under the appearances  slowly deprived by their aggressiveness , the visionary character of this painting, and therefore go deep into the very heart of a spiritual aptitude willing to create masks for itself, as for an innate sense of reserve.  The authentic core of Sécan’s painting can reappear just that way, that is first going past the deceit of the matter, thick and angry, and then letting the peremptory and convulsed gesture that lays it on the canvas settle, and licking out the burning colour: the spectator can understand that the core is the ganglion, a tight knot of feelings, continuously laced up, undone, and laced up again thanks to a fervid imagination.  It is a knot of feelings in a perennial condition of alert:  the condition of alert, of moral restlessness typical  of the man willing to dream and, at the same time, experiencing how much the natural faults of every day realism unfavourable to dreams.  The apparent violence of Sécan’s painting is, first of all,  the sign of his opposition to the natural difficulties of every day life.  On the contrary, it is the protection, the shield behind which his imagination, not to tell his dreams, can express itself and become painting.  We can recognize how, for many subsequent rebounds of sensitivity and culture, it seems to recall in modern world a very original message of moving expressiveness.

Luigi Carluccio

Following an acute participation to the events of the profound psyche, Sécan is engaged in captivating the primitive energies, the chthonic forces, the mysterious senses which continuously he foresees: in making  a visible presence what is invisible.  As a result,  his works, thanks to the high spirituality by which they are animated, appear to the observer with the revealing force typical of the “ discovery” : works which break the velarium of the sensualistic knowledge, conditioned by the visual habit , and which enlighten a world “ autre” where matter and thought, objective knowledge and unconscious impulses, wrap themselves in an unexpected spell.  Since the far 1942, Sécan operated on the line of abstract with probative results: thus the cycle of his adventure closes, at present, with  those works that Michel Tapié  puts under the banner of subformal, which witness the creative vitality that has always supported the artist.

Carlo Munari

As a violent and sensual impulse, as the mystical ardour of a seraphic spirit may make the lights of Georges Sécan’s palette vibrate with a secret beauty ( but sometimes it may happen that the one or the other could breathe in his largest canvases, like in the charming images he is able to evoke in a span of splendid painting). The same way, Sécan can appear and be the exceptional virtuous, true swordsman of the brush dizzily elegant and , contemporarily, the champion of the purest pictorial essence: the fruit which tastes harshly wild, but smells delicately as from a garden.  Thus, at the end, the man and his work live in their own free individuality thwarting every attempt by any person who would try to label them in any school or trend, even if it is nothing but Sécan’s painting, with its very high tones always dewy with light.  The extreme freedom of its chromatic connotations, the same flexibility of his language, always give Sécan’s painting, so excited by matter and light, the most fruitful and dynamical start to the fantastic creation of a new spatial realm.  It’s his world.   A world which, from time to time, can look like escaped from a visionary’s nightmares or dreams, almost like the visual emanation of those potential energies set free in it, rising directly from the artist’s emotion and sensitivity in the very moment when they come out from the vortex of the colour, with the hallucinated fury of subconscious, but always urged by the deepest spiritual resonance, where we can watch the most hidden aspirations of he who contemplates almost with nostalgia, the lost paradise of Beauty and Goodness.

Angelo Dragone

Sécan isn’t easily definable.  He believes in inspiration, in its  peremptoriness in the ambit of creation.  His works, sometimes multivalent, are even tragic thanks to there sumptuousness, and they determine universality also regarding the simplest event.  Sécan loves colours and, thanks to his astonishing ability, uses them in the most unforeseeable ways.  The chromatic dominants are: red, which is passion supporting the artist’s emotional spur; yellow, that warms the image, giving it expansion and dynamism; other colours lend a visionary profound sense of religion: in cosmic extension, of course.  He is constitutionally a moralist who exhorts without preaching and doesn’t censure like all who respect human feelings, and is afraid that someone can hurt them. Seeing Sécan’s fast sketching  a drawing, I have understood how much importance the impulse, the extemporariness, invest in his creativity.  From the base of an indefinite longing, he precises in his “making” the same sense of the making and its significant:  thus he can’t but operate in the most absolute, inventive  freedom, including, obviously, language and expressiveness because nothing is pre-constituted or conventional in his painting.

Marcello Azzolini

Sécan imposes his own and authentic style  as a man of culture decanted on the refined thread of French ascendance, with the language declined on paradigms of a continuous elaboration, and the sensitivity to the news of restless research.  The use of a dense and bright chromatic matter, imbued with light in the waving strokes  ( the pure technique may fall into line with the ways of the informal or of the tachism) with grey-earthly tones to the spread bright reds, then to heights of daring fluorescent greens results into composite layered  draftings in a suggested space which becomes places for an open spiritual adventures.

Anna Maria Raini Beltrame

The nature of Georges Sécan and of his painting is certainly variable, restless.  The control of the method, in that meaning implying a rational “ constant” are not terms we can use in this kind of communication completely emotional and gestural, devoted to the expressive violence of the colour.  It’s an art that in its stormy impetuousness is rather a kind of bright visionary pantheism.

Roberto Sanesi
                                               

Sécan’s language is unmistakable.   In the context of the great painting we rarely happen to face a quicker and richer crossing and yet so deeply characterized by a unitary mark, as we do in the narration of this elected artist.  In front of Sécan’s paintings, any superficial observation is impossible.  For it’s a painting which “ grows”, swells when watched, dragging your thought towards the lonely paths of conscience, it grabs one of your instants of silence, of sweetness and takes you gently but firmly till the remote areas of the memory:  it crystallizes for a moment one of your casual gestures and transfers it into the majestic amphitheatre where great dramas of life are celebrated: and there ‘s no way to permit a detached  examination, a hurried reading; you directly and suddenly find yourself protagonist of that painting, deepened in the pictorial cloth, you yourself an actor and a director in those large spaces tormented by the artist’s pursuing intervention. It’s clear that a painting so powerful, so insinuating in a direct involvement of the observer, thanks to its very magnetic component, goes beyond any definition.  And yet, defining it would not give more to its fascinating power. But we remain with that restless desire of going beyond, of deep understanding, of catching, just for a while, the secret of its tormenting impastos, of its glorious upsurges, of its incandescent depths. 

Lisetta Belotti

The most shrewd technical lover, the most sagacious and skilled critic will hardly succeed in taking from Sécan’s art a set phrase more or less audacious, if not arbitrary, as we use today in order to appear well informed, at least in the wordy magic.  The fabulous Sécanian  painting, the inimitable impastos of his palette, the esoteric voice which calls him to prove himself  in the work, like in a sort of orphic mystery, escapes any deep positive analysis. The same happened always and only for the true creators, in all times.  On these living canvases, there flatters a sense of musical and poetic combination summed up in a painting,  inscrutable in its psychological genesis and in its ineffable aesthetical expression. Sécan is neither the epilogue nor the disciple of a school: he has created his own school, his own art which are perfectly faithful to his original, artistic sensitivity.

Igino Senesi

Sécan continues to retain the freshness of his unalterable youth, the fervid imagination which finds its  roots in ancestral human emotions, that only a painter like him ( still open to surprise and experimentation ) can feel.  He has found new and original accents, looking inside himself and there detecting another “ himself”, a new, primordial, metaphysical subconscious, completely foreign to our common subconscious, survived into us during millennia, for which the artist, moved and upset, has taken the creative substance of his current style.

Nino Nava

There is no doubt that, in Sécan’s painting, a few of the highest moment of the chronicle of modern art  are recognizable: from the fauvism from the expressionism, from surrealism to informal and to gestualism of a very particular action painting.  However, it will be never possible to take again even one single painting of Sécan’s into the predetermined schemes of  a trend, in the constricting ambit of a moment or of a school.  Every painting of Sécan’s, even if in his extreme language mobility, or rather thanks to his perennial expressive disposability and to his natural disposition to any opening, every painting of Sécan’s, I repeat, is a poetic fact apart, it’s an “unicum“ in the context of the whole planetary production of art, it’s an act of the spirit almost physiologically transposed in a concrete pictorial dimension.  Every painting of Sécan’s is an irreversible and unrepeatable event, originated only by a superior vital energy, which obstinately refuses and rejects every intellectualistic or psychological external influence, which doesn’t come to terms either with the cultural instrumentation or the emotional, sentimental and ephemeral suggestion.  Every painting of Sécan’s is a  rite, is a sacral “ practice” whose entire rigor, purity, even cruelty he maintains untouched:  it is a magician’s gesture or, if you prefer, a saint’s one: and certainly not by chance, one of the most well-known French critics, Claude Roger- Marx in the “ Figaro Littéraire “ has remarked that “ in Every painting of Sécan’s eyes one can see a kind of holiness”.

Luciano Budigna

Based on the steady foundations of a sumptuous pictorial substance, Every painting of Sécan’s work turns out into a powerful allegory determined by the expression of feelings as mysterious as communicative.  Qualified as subformal, every painting of Sécan’s work doesn’t however belong to any sect of the so-called avant-garde:  the splendour of freedom is its characteristic feature, lifting it to the highest level of art.  

Maximilien Gauthier

It seems to me that the main feature of every painting of Sécan’s work is the pursuit of an expression balanced between two terms of spirituality: as knowledge enquiry (sometimes by a mystical impulsion) and elegance, naturally very French.  From here, a searching tension, also pictorial , originates, where the sudden stimulus of emotive kind is overexposed, and serves almost as  a catalyser, in the very pictorial way, of the contradictions of two instances, naturally antithetical.   It results in elaborated abstractions, set free from mannerist rhythms: on the contrary, his art is rich in technical, emotional or fantastic  qualities, particularly thanks to the colour in its expressive violence.  Therefore it’s not an end in itself, but it is rather perceivable as a metaphor in virtue of a lively and capturing sensitive component.

Massimo Carrà