Pierre Buraglio — Se cantonner — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 26 → December 9, 2017

Galerie Jean Fournier is presenting a new solo exhibition of the recent work of Pierre Buraglio, comprising paintings and works on paper in which we rediscover the principles underpinning his output since the 1970s: reuse, assemblage, collage and quotation.

The recurring themes of his oeuvre — his surroundings, his home, his friends and family — are still present, but most recently his emphasis has been on the figure and the portrait, observed either from life or in pictures by the masters.

At the core of the exhibition is a series of hitherto unshown self-portraits, paintings on plywood composed like collages. Buraglio’s face — we recognise the glasses and the resolute gaze — mingles with portraits and self-portraits of such famous artists as Bonnard, Derain, Cézanne and Van Gogh, admired in the course of all those visits to the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre. These collages are his way of affirming his presence in the history of art and presenting himself as a painter; and in a parodic vein his self-portraits signal a yen for a graceful, light-hearted confrontation with history’s greats.

Another theme extensively explored in these paintings, gouaches and drawings is Buraglio’s environment, and in particular that endless source of inspiration, his house in Maisons-Alfort, in the Paris suburbs. A series of seven paintings on plywood focuses on the variations in its facade. In their play on planes, disparities, reuse and collage, his works also reference Malevich’s stylised compositions. Once again the private links up with the broader story and personal fiction encounters art history.

Last but not least, a group of drawings backs up the themes already tackled. Sampled from the sketchbooks that accompany Buraglio when holidaying or travelling, these drawings belong to the realm of the intimate: resorting to a seeming economy of means and materials — pens, markers, pencils, watercolour — he draws the people he loves and empathetically and modestly reveals the beauty he finds around him.

’It’s a matter of sitting tight,’ says Pierre Buraglio. But it would be be wide of the mark to take this as an admission of a deliberate restriction or isolation, when what is at stake is a stance firmly — even stubbornly — asserted. The proof is a constancy of practice — simple materials and operations, reuse — which references a personal economy as much as an ethics." (1)

———

The exhibition will be accompanied by a booklet containing a text by Guitemie Maldonado (professor at ENSBA, Paris and the Ecole du Louvre).

On Saturday 2 December, at the gallery, the artist will dedicate copies of “Notes discontinues”, a collection of his writings since 2007, with a preface by Pierre Wat, published by L’Atelier contemporain.

¹ Guitemie Maldonado, “À force de voir”, in the exhibition booklet, Paris, 2017.