Pierre-Yves Bohm — Troubles of my time — Christophe Gaillard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 24 → February 23, 2013

The Gallery Christophe Gaillard presents the first personal exhibition of Pierre-Yves Bohm. Since his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tourcoing in 2009, he slowly pursues his creation and a series of large paintings and several works on paper will be shown to the public for the first time.

Pierre-Yves Bohm, throughout his career as a painter, explored the material in order to represent the humanity; silhouettes, faces, bodies, skulls and recumbent effigies are figured and then mutilated on the canvas.

The works are often made of canvas offcuts — like pieces of shrouds — sewn together like a skin graft. Indeed, Yves Brochard writes, “We are surprised by this wide array of techniques. Several actions, some well known, some stranger: parts of the canvas, visibly salvaged, are sewn and there are these kinds of colored dots that emerge from the fibers, as if they came from the rear of the canvas. As if the back side asked to reveal itself frontward. Sometimes some canvases are suggest ive of an stressing process, I’m referring here to Voile de crane, under the wonderful grey background, painted dots can be seen and make us guess that the artist literally makes the painting “sweat“ by squeezing it to the back of the canvas and back there it sometimes turns into a real chaos.

The back of the canvases are (for that matter) often as much worked by the artist as the front: “ What is not visible exists and what exists does not form a screen. (…) The canvas is an entity both behind and on its front side, in the same way that a human being is not limited to his surface.“ “The paint that comes out through the pores, the pinholes in the canvas that form a sort of screen or glaze, install a color all over the surface. What I am looking for is to see the color seep or pearl like a color sweat that would be a real part of the canvas, as if the canvas leaked out color. “Yves Brochard again, makes us wonder about the artist universe.

“What is the universe of Pierre-Yves Bohm? If we look closely, figures, scenes emerge from these graphic networks, they are, as he says himself “always the same character“ and then heads, a man caught by a dog, tools, weapons, scenes of torture as if they were buried.

Sometimes it evokes Nancy Spero for the freedom of the drawing, or Leon Golub for having the boldness to paint this. Like them there is the question of involvement in painting but also in the way the world changes: “How can I talk about the daily routine with my painting?“. Up on his feet, he was a warrior, lying horizontally he is an effigy. This painting has, in the studio, the appearance of a spoilsport, how did it get to this point ? It is, in my opinion, a beautiful step of the artist’s journey as we guess that he chose the most risky path, the most adventurous, that this painting still worries him or as he says “displaying it that way is unfamiliar to me”. Beside, the Homme aux poings serrés could almost seem serene, brown grid background on red face, like a revelation. In the other room, two square formats are also waiting, a skull and a face on a black background. The first one is made of “relics“ that were lying on the floor in the artist’s studio and the second one is made of drawings falls sewn together as a “skin graft“. As we write those lines, the daily evening newspaper delivers, on the 21st: “On the markets, investors remain phlegmatic”, on the 22nd: “Torturing to set an exemple”… vast is the range of titles offered to choice. And there is the painter in his studio lost in this beleaguered area of Roubaix, in this old factory where beautifully surnamed waffles were made. Anxiety, questions, mistrust…confronting today’s world … but through painting, and ending up inventing a gesture “to agree with" the latter.