Charles Rollier
Born in 1912.
Died in 1968.
Charles Rollier (1912–1968), a Swiss painter born in Milan, studied at the Accademia di Brera before settling in Basel in 1934, fleeing Italian fascism. There he met the curator Georg Schmidt and became part of Basel’s artistic milieu. He lived in Paris between 1938 and 1940, then returned to Switzerland and settled in Geneva.
The Paris years, his exchanges with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Bazaine and Nicolas de Staël, as well as his interest in philosophy and spiritual traditions, contributed to the development of a personal pictorial language. From the mid-1950s onwards, his paintings combined figures and signs with vast fields of colour, with an intensity that can evoke Art Informel. Rollier nevertheless resisted being defined simply as an abstract painter: he sought to transfigure the human figure and express an inner or sacred dimension.
He took part in the Salon de Mai in Paris from 1948 to 1950 and exhibited in several countries. After settling permanently in Geneva in 1952, he worked in his studio in Chêne-Bourg. Rollier’s painting is distinguished by its balance between structure, movement and bodily presence, at the intersection of post-war figuration and abstraction.
