‘’The magic of painting is a bit like perfume or smell, it can bring you back not in the memory but in the reality of the memory. It's like the story of the madeleine: suddenly you are transported to the place of your memory and the emotion becomes very strong.’’ (Interview with Olivier Masmonteil, Toute La Culture, 2020)
Born in 1973 in Romilly-sur-Seine, France, Olivier Masmonteil lives and works in Paris.
Masmonteil is represented by the Thomas Bernard - Cortex Athletico Gallery in Paris, France.
After studying at the National School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux and the Academy of Fine Arts Jacques Gabriel Chevalier in Brives, France, he exhibited for the first time at the Suzanne Tarasiève Gallery in 2002. He then went to Germany at the Spinnerei in Leipzig where he will take part in several individual and collective exhibitions, notably at the Michael Schultz Gallery in Berlin.
In order to explore the landscape in greater depth and to renew the experience of traveling painters, he begins his first world tour, which he will complete with a second one in 2011.
He returned to France in 2012 and will immerse himself in the exploration of the history of painting claiming at the same time of all the periods like so much of a timeless painting. At the same time demanding and extravagant, he imagined a work protocol meticulously defined, such as a playwright
who from the first words of his text would already know the outcome. Thus, over the years and his series, he gradually wrote the chapters which constitute, in a present and future time, his life as a painter. After twelve years spent painting landscapes of all horizons, grouped within a first part, the possibility of painting, it has arrived today at the beginning of its second chapter, The pleasure of painting.
A monograph on his work was published in the Autumn of 2018 by Cercle d'Art.