Ceysson & Bénétière

 

So it was possible to paint, to paint something while granting the person doing the painting the ultimate meaning. This is precisely what Buraglio has consistently done since 2004. Not because he suddenly turned his back to his many years spent working whitout a brush, but rather in an attempt to offer a follow-up to a way of working that he had exhausted: an onward continuation that would not relinquish anything of the original process - the painting and unpainting, the doing and undoing present both in L’Atelier Brianchon and more actively in the Agrafes and Caviardages [Redactings], and in the Drawings from paintings made in the deliberately narrow and intimate setting of Maison-Alfort. [...]

When it reappeared, this line, this stroke did not do so on its own. It carried something else in its wake, something that was asking to resurface after being buried for so long under the surface of the works. This was the biographical, personal dimension of the artist’s motivations, which his working body had kept in mind, but had not, for many years, dared to express. Who knows: it may be that the riveting Matissian blue of an Assemblage de paquets de Gauloises reminds him of the cigarettes that his parents used to smoke? For a long time, the autonomy that the work of art was supposed to carry in and of itself did not sit well with this kind of admission. If Buraglio’s 2004 decision distanced itself from something, then surely it was from this. Not because Buraglio, through his painting, gave in to an outpouring of feelings that in no way resembles him, but simply because from then on, the act of painting became inseparable from the idea of painting with – with one’s history and with History, both being inextricably linked. The artist uses a fitting expression to describe this idea: in reference to the war, which he experienced as a child mostly through the impact it had on the adults around him, and in regards to his current painting process, he uses the term “intimate war”.

Pierre Wat, Pierre Buraglio, peintre, extract from the exhibition catalogue

Pierre Buraglio - Bas voltage (1960-2019), MAMC+,

Musée d'art moderne de Saint-Étienne

 

Artist : Pierre Buraglio

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Ceysson & Bénétière
23 rue du Renard
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