Stéphane Bordarier — comme l’eau dans l’eau — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 19 → March 4, 2017

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting recent works by Stéphane Bordarier in this, his fourteenth solo exhibition here.

This new show comprises canvases of different formats — 178 x 203 cm, 175 × 175 cm, 140 × 140 cm and small works 40 × 40 cm — together with paintings on paper. All the exhibits date from the period 2015–2016.

Indebted to the work of the painterly avant-gardes of the 1960s–1970s, Stéphane Bordarier paints according to a set of rules — constraints than nonetheless allow for myriad chromatic and formal variations. He paints on a stretched canvas coated with rabbit skin glue for as long as it takes for the glue to dry. Thus his work is time-defined: he says he is “expelled” from the canvas by the drying process, which governs the finishing of the picture. It is as if colour and form have crystallised.

While Bordarier still abides by the principles decided upon in the 1990s, this group of works employs a broader range of colours: Mars Violet (used since 1996) and Copper Sulphate, both featured in his previous exhibition, are now complemented by black and a Red Oxide. The pictures on show extend and expand on the work shown at MAMCO in Geneva during the summer of 2015.

In a series of new works the painted shape emerges from a coating of pre- pigmented glue primer. On this uneven, aleatory surface there materialises a visual imbroglio linked to its own inner depths by its peaks and troughs. Application with a wide scraper reduces the artist’s control and contributes to what looks like the outcome of a single stroke.

The exhibition is also the chance for the artist to show big new paintings on paper. Here he uses very much the same technique as for the canvases: the first stage consists of a thin coat of white acrylic, which is then overlaid with a colour. The result is a work in which the action of the painter’s hand is totally visible and legible.

“No need to emphasise that colour is central to this artist’s questionings and experiments … At first glance the vocabulary and grammar seem to add up to a repertoire that is obstinately “limited”, not to say minimal, in its extreme economy of means: but the syntax remains rich in elaborations, with the work continuing to evolve as new inputs converge and are juxtaposed with the practices of the past. For Bordarier there is always the temptation, and the striving, to rediscover a colour or a sensation of luminosity."¹

A monograph including a conversation between Stéphane Bordarier and Erik Verhagen will be published by Editions Analogues next spring.

¹ Erik Verhagen in Stéphane Bordarier, exh. cat., (Montpellier: Musée Fabre/Actes Sud, 2010), pp. 21–22.