Guillaume Bresson — Nathalie Obadia Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 31 → July 21, 2012

A theatrical gallery of figures watches the seemingly wanton destruction of an unlikely looking water tower; a group meets at daybreak to prepare some pointless operation: urban and vegetal no-man’s-lands await the climax of an action that will never come: these paintings by Guillaume Bresson combine formal harmony and narrative quirkiness, making the artist a worthy heir of the literary and cinematographic avant-gardes. He redeploys the narrative experiments of the Nouveau Roman and the dramaturgical innovations of the theatre of the absurd in a pictorial space inherited from the Italian Renaissance and French classicism.

Following on from Bresson’s emblematic paintings showing urban non-places and peripheries — parking lots, housing projects — this exhibition sees the artist broaden his creative processes and sources, emphasising friction between the representations and space-time. Unlike the “disposable” images produced by the media for mass consumption, anachronism is used here to link the image with the radical definition given by Georges Didi-Huberman in his authoritative essay, Devant le temps : “a montage of different time frames, a symptom rending the normal flow of things.”

While the photo-realist finish of parts of the paintings reveals the long preparatory process involving photographs and computer imaging — amateur models sitting for the artist, gathering images on the Internet, the choice of props for their signifying qualities, 3D modelling of the scenes created — other parts of the canvas shatter the photographic illusion: a conspicuous brushstroke on a tree stump abruptly breaks the mimetic representation: the painting shows itself to be deceptive, leaving the beholder with the magnificent gaping hole of abstract, unsignifying paint matter.