Bernard Moninot — Cadastre — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → May 4, 2018

The third solo exhibition by the artist in the gallery has been organised with the Galerie Jean Fournier, which will be holding an exhibition on the same dates entitled Chambre d’Echo.

The exhibition Cadastre, which focuses on the drawings of Bernard Moninot, which are central to his oeuvre, includes various recent and hitherto unseen series of works: Cadastre, Clinamen, Lignes d’erre, À la poursuite des nuages, and Lumière Fossile.

Bernard Moninot, Lumière fossile, 2016 Peinture glycéro et pentacrines collées sur verre — 50 cm de diamètre

Guided by chance, the drawings in the Cadastre and Lignes d’erre series are created instantaneously. They are the result of the observation and collection of drawings from La mémoire du vent (‘The memory of the wind’), which he created by attaching a stylus to the ends of flowers or tree branches. This project has given him greater freedom in his approach, as this time the drawing is no longer based on preconceived ideas and has been instilled with renewed spontaneity. Continuous lines, drawn on the surface in acrylic or China ink using a ruling pen, form on the paper an area generated by lines alone. The interlacing lines form a sort of ‘all-over’ composition.

Bernard Moninot, Lignes d’erre_18.12.16, 2016 Graphite, China ink and watercolour on paper — 18 × 14 cm

Hence, Bernard Moninot reinterprets the words of Jean-Luc Nancy in the preface of the catalogue of the exhibition Dessin(s) in the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2014:

‘The line begins its journey and forms a longer line. It is only aligned, underlined, and highlighted in an incidental and derivative way: essentially, it extends before one with no other rule than the unknown and the uncharted, where it meanders like the fisherman’s line in the river’.

À la poursuite des nuages (‘In pursuit of the clouds’) is the title of a series of ‘meteorological drawings’ that were systematically annotated minute by minute as they were created. Bernard Moninot had created an initial series on this theme in 2013, and already the drawings formed a celestial narrative, made up of cloudy phrases. The works executed during the summer of 2017 were created with a Japanese brush, in order to render the transparency of the mass of the clouds, according to the eighteenth-century tradition. They are drawing performances that are completed over the course of a day and require several hours of sustained work and concentration.

Bernard Moninot, A la poursuite des nuages_13.07.2017, 2017 China ink and watercolour on paper — 48 × 38 cm

In all his drawings, the lines that are drawn are based on the artist’s observations, the skies, stars, and seismographic recordings—a ‘cadastral map’ of a mental landscape.

During the periods of intense work, which mainly takes place in his studio in the Jura region, and after various visits to the astronomical observatory of Haute Provence, which triggered the idea of translating the ‘experiences of thought’, Bernard Moninot produced several series of drawings which resonate with each other.

The Clinamen series was produced after these visits. The clinamen is a divergence, the deviation of moving atoms from a straight path through the void. The artist has translated the Epicurean concept by superposing two drawn ‘maps’ on transparent canvases with a gap of several centimetres between them.

Lastly, a model from the Chambre d’Echo project will also be on display at the gallery, creating a link with the eponymous and simultaneous exhibition at the Galerie Jean Fournier. This project, which is very complex and on which the artist has been working for five years, is a three-dimensional work that represents the course of long-term memory in a spatial device.

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Bernard MONINOT

The artist studied at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied the art of engraving in Lucien Coutaud’s studio. From 1983 to 2006, he taught at the Écoles de Beaux-Arts in Bourges, Angers, and Nantes, and at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 2006 to 2015.

Bernard Moninot, Lignes d’erre_18.12.16, 2016 Graphite, China ink and watercolour on paper — 18 × 14 cm

Principal exhibitions:

The 1971 and 1973 Paris Biennial; the Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint Etienne, 1974; the Documenta international exhibition in Kassel, 1977; the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1979; the ARC, the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, 1980; the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997; the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburg, 1998; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and Delhi, 2001; the MAC VAL Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2012; and the Musée Cocteau, Menton, 2013.

In 2012, Jean-Christophe Bailly wrote a monograph on the artist, published by Éditions André Dimanche.