Bernard Gaube — À propos — Slash Paris

Bernard Gaube addresses painting as if it were a game. Rather, he devotes himself to it with all the seriousness and commitment play requires. Prior to the “finished” work come versions varying from one canvas to another, first thoughts and painterly intrigues carried over in his paintings. A few compositional rules — every game has rules — lay down the law. In particular he borrows Le Corbusier’s principle of the “Modulor”, whose geometrical system of harmonious relationships is based on the golden mean. Another frequent contributor to the spatial structuring of his canvases is the grid, more visible because drawn with the brush. Probably reminiscent of the squaring technique — and the famous modernist grid. Duly structured, the picture becomes habitable and ready to accept figures. What kind of figures hardly counts: everything is grist to Gaube’s mill, where the abstract mixes freely with the figurative. Simple touches of colour sometimes argue the point with human shapes — including his own, there being lots of self-portraits. In the final analysis these figures add up to a repertoire the painter deploys as he pleases, with their arbitrary, not to say precarious assemblage making each work a statement in its own right. The analogy with the video-making process is evident: the montage is what determines the result, and Gaube doesn’t fail to turn these editing gambits into a playful exercise. Last but not least, among the different pictorial scenarios he tries out, unspooling a harmonious arrangement of gestures, colours and forms from canvas to canvas, he doesn’t miss the chance to slip his palette or a hint of a grid in among the picture elements: a way of showing what goes on behind the scenes.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019.
(translation by John Tittensor)