Pol Pierart — Bernard Bouche Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 3, 2016 → January 28, 2017

" If there is an artist who will never change the path he was determined to follow, without giving into the trend, it is Pol Pierart. Apart and almost in secret, he keeps his work constant and coherent. And what is unpredictable is that his work continues to retain our attention and change the way we see things. Indeed, it puts an end to the triumph of display. Throughout his exhibitions, we are still captivated by the small discoveries of a man who, without being fond of speaking in public, plays cleverly with words using irony and understatements. The artist says that his paintings allow him to go directly to the essential, they allow him to capture the physical presence of the word. Thus, in contrast to his photographie that attracts attention by modes of association endowed with a meaning and by staging aphorisms and other games of language, the canvases surprise with a great economy of means and with a rhythmic syntax limited to a single word. In the fresh colour the painter quickly traces regular letters that compose an apparently insignificant term. Those who know a little bit the artist do not ignore the continuation: by the game of strike-off, superimposed lines, and doctored letters, the initially written word takes on a new meaning and stimulates to all kinds of readings, excursions and detours. Like comets, the letters wiggle in our thoughts. They go fast, they just touch, and, without bothering about aesthetics or technical virtuosity, they go hand in hand with the ironie of the delivered message. If the exercise of style gets us ready to smile, behind the apparent lightness there are, however, the semantic interferences, a gravity that admits to being just something fairly disturbing. It may be something like a deletion of a letter, a barely noticeable erasure or, suddenly, the reversal of a meaning that operates the doctored letters. Even if it doesn’t seem like it, the artist takes a visitor by a sleeve to make him/her think. (…)

Forever crossed by desire and dissatisfaction, his paintings vibrate with a flowing gesture and a material that unites the word and the colour. In fact, we do not talk too much about the colour. Yet, it is a major concern of Pol Pierart. The colour is the matrix of the word which arises, it is the trace of the physical experience of the painter. Full of nuances, it guarantees, along with the variations of features and the imperfect spelling, the aspect of incompleteness of his work. Receding from the pure colour, the artist chooses valuable gradients and shades of the past, almost transparent. (…)

Pledged to the desorder of feelings and infinite semantic orchestrations, the painting of Pol Pierart is decidedly unclassifiable, and that is without a doubt the reason why it resists with no difficulty the secure revenues, the ephemeral success and fashion."

— Extract of the text on Pol Pierart by Julie Bawin (issue N34 of the « L’art même », 2007)