Paul Conte

Paul Conte (born 1947 in Nice, France) is a painter and sculptor. He is best known for his murals completed in 2013 in the 17th-century Saint Charles-Saint Claude chapel in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southeastern France.
Career
Conte was born in the South of France, but spent much of his early youth in Rome with his grandfather, a translator of Dante, and has returned to Rome throughout his life. This may account for the "eminently Roman" quality of his work, writes Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky, "as if long buried frescoes were coming to life."
Conte has also created logos, book illustrations, and book cover art.
He is also a sculptor.
Among his most notable works are his paintings and murals for chapels and churches in the South of France. In 1996, for the chapel of Notre Dame des Neiges et de la Paix, in , he created six paintings, "three of which represent the Virgin under her three names, while the other three evoke the circumstances in which the chapel was built. These paintings were consecrated by Mgr. François de Saint-Macary, then Bishop of Nice."
In 2012 and 2013 he painted murals "inspired by the lives of Saint Claude du Jura and Saint Charles Borromée" in the Saint Charles-Saint Claude chapel, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Visitors were allowed to enter the chapel and watch him work, as captured in a segment broadcast on France Télévisions. "I was able to encounter him as he exercised his talent, a universal language that speaks only of beauty and remembrance," wrote gallery owner Pauline Seiller; "he succeeded in producing colorful vibrations and the desire to meditate in this magical spot."
In 2014 he painted a fresco for the choir loft in the church of Notre Dame de la Mer, in Cagnes-sur-Mer.
Themes, technique, and subject matter
"His paintings are populated by gods, heroes and saints from the pages of Homer, Ovid, the Bible or Dante," writes , depicting "winged victories, warriors in combat under the walls of ancient Troy, meetings of Antony and of Cleopatra, the Annunciation made to Mary…characters, scenes and decorations of Roman palaces, friezes and pediments of Greek temples, fountains of the Italian Renaissance."
"Conte defines himself as a peintre à programme, by which he means that he needs a subject matter outside of painting itself to build an oeuvre and awaken memories. His universe is peopled with angels, gods, heroes and saints, reminiscent of a long heritage of religious and history painting."
Figures in a procession is a persistent theme in his work, "because of what they represent in our cutlural, Judeo-Christian, and Western memory."

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