Thierry Hay

Mixed techniques

When he was a student at the Louvre College, Thierry Hay traveled to Italy several times. He discovered ancient frescoes and the Italian painting of the 17th Century. Several years later, he became an archeologist in Egypt where he lived for two years, becoming impassioned with the fragmentation of light, the verticality of the Egyptian monuments and the scars that time has left on stone, like it does on people's faces.

On leaving Egypt, he returned to France where he became a journalist, then an international reporter for several television channels for which he produced several documentaries, in particular for "Envoyé Spécial" on France 2.

He has always been impassioned by painting, struck by the violence and emotion given off by German Expressionism. Mantegna, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Goya, Münch, Soutine, Nicolas de Staël and Francis Bacon have always enthused him. Now, as an artist, his paintings are imbued with omnipresence, an obsession with color, the strength of expression, especially in his faces. Combining a system of acrylic, wax and oil techniques, completed by a process of uncanny scratching and rubbing, Thierry Hay gives a timeless dimension to each of his paintings, the sort found in ancient icons in which the march of time have only left the essential intact.

This comes through in the work of Thierry Hay, who has been painting for 5 years "because he cannot do otherwise". Born in 1955, lives in Paris.