Matisse Now — Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien, Pierre Mabille autour de dessins originaux de Matisse — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 10 → April 23, 2016

Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting the exhibition Matisse Now, which brings together works on paper by Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien and Pierre Mabille around a core offering of five original drawings by Henri Matisse. Revealing the kinship, acknowledged or indirect, between these artists and the Matisse oeuvre, the exhibition has been designed in resonance with the 10th Drawing Now salon. Exclusively devoted to contemporary drawing, the salon is held in Paris every spring.¹

Matisse Now comprises emblematic and in some cases hitherto unshown works by four artists individually tackling the “eternal conflict between drawing and colour”. Drawing is the underpinning of the Matisse oeuvre: he endlessly noted down what was around him — women, plants, interiors — and even drew into colour when he came up with the brilliant innovation of his cutouts. The five drawings chosen here testify to his sheer technical range and capacity for self-renewal: Indian ink, pencils, direct and more complex use of line, spatial saturation, light emanating from the white of the paper, and simplification sometimes bordering on the abstract.

Despite their radical differences, the exhibition’s four contemporary contributors find a natural unity in their assimilation of the Matisse canon. His influence, however, is integrated more as a state of mind — as a sensory relationship with the world.

From the early Masquages (Maskings) and Fenêtres (Windows) of the 1970s up to the present, Pierre Buraglio has maintained his own kind of link, at once ironic and respectful, with Matisse. The Dessins d’après (Drawings After) series is shot through with this inclusive, playful spirit. Buraglio is Matissian in his attachment to reality: that of his surroundings and his materials.

Frédérique Lucien’s suite IL (HE) betrays a similar relation to its models, while the series Feuiller (Breaking into Leaf) also addresses the notion of the decorative, combining grids and abstract motifs with solid-colour cutouts evocative of vegetal forms.

Paper can lend itself to colouring, slicing and tearing. The exhibition has provided Pierre Mabille with a pretext for new series of cutouts; while still recognisable, his characteristic shape is adroitly sabotaged by a system of coloured contrasts and counterforms. Stéphane Bordarier’s torn paper series interrogates the radical character of Matisse’s direct cutting into colour. In his paintings form hinges on a technical constraint, the drying time of glue mixed into pigment; here Bordarier contains form via the act of tearing.

Made up of “sidesteps” that include cutting-up, coloured material, models, the vegetal, line, and the work in progress, the exhibition raises the issue of contemporary reminiscences of the Matisse oeuvre. Through his inventiveness and observation of his daily life and immediate environment, Matisse achieved an unsurpassable universalism endlessly reconsidered by the artists of today.

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¹ Galerie Jean Fournier is one of the four galleries to have taken part in all ten editions of the salon. This year part of its stand will feature Pierre Buraglio // Carreau du Temple // STAND B4 // 30 March — 3 April 2016.