Bernard Piffaretti, Fairts divers et variés, 1996. ©Vue de l'exposition Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris
Christian Bonnefoi, Stéphane Bordarier, Bernard Piffaretti: no school, movement, or group unites these three painters. They share, rather, a premise: in all three painters’ works, neither the gestural amplitude nor the rhythmic vivacity that determines the appearance of their forms is hidden. “Warm“ forms, in appearance, forms that have nothing — visually — in common with the coldness, the calculating control and distanciation that characterizes a more geometric abstraction.
We would think of abstract expressionism if, in each of these artist’s work, this vocabulary didn’t seem to have been “disimpregnated” of the emotional, psychological, physical or even spiritual charge with which expressionism usually invests it. An indifferent painting, in a way. In 1985, regarding Bernard Piffaretti, Yves Michaud spoke of a “removed expressionism.”1 Removed, in other words: a kind of painting that takes and rejects at the same time. That appropriates a vocabulary, but which appropriates it in a selective, critical way. Thus, expressionism minus something… Here, the forms are — literally — relieved of what they were charged with in their original context. As Yves Michaud writes: “The paradox of this way of proceeding is that while the pictorial process retains all of its force and spontaneity, it does not directly express a subjective desire and does not highlight the role of the painter.”
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