Matisse Now

Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien,

Pierre Mabille and Henri Matisse

 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.

Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting this fourth solo exhibition by Pierre Mabille, devoted to a group of recent paintings.

Since 1997 Mabille has been concentrating on repeated exploration of a single form, one which came to him for the first time when reading Fernando Pessoa’s poem ‘The Tobacco Shop’, in which the shop sign functions as a visual trigger for the poem’s narrative development.

Layered, multiplied, repeated unvaryingly, this single form – a pointed oval – offers Mabille ever-greater freedom not only pictorially, but also in his use of colour: for the subject of his painting is colour in all its variations and accidents.

In terms of form and colour his recent work is marked by a much greater complexity and richness. This has given rise to the formation of groups, which the artist calls ‘families’. Three of these groups make up this exhibition.

In the first, medium-format group, the elongated oval generates an undulating movement which orients the viewer’s reading of the picture. The coloured curves intertwine and delineate the form, while the strips and forms mingle without actually mixing.

In the second group, this movement seems to be frozen by the presence of horizontal strips, which set up a grid within which interpolation of the oval form halts the flow. The areas of flat colour set off an interplay of transparency with the modulated surface, with the previous layers, brushstrokes and pencil marks showing through.

In the final group the form is set free, opening up and becoming fully itself in large areas of solid colour. Ample and generous, the oval shape seems to be afloat in colour.

In parallel with his work as a painter, Pierre Mabille has put together an anti-dictionary of possible definitions of ‘his form’. Fuelled by this collection of words and images, his painting is moving towards greater chromatic richness and greater balance. As art and culture historian Christine Lapostolle has put it, ‘There is something radiant in Pierre Mabille’s painting. It emanates an energy which is then absorbed back into the picture field.’[1]

To mark this exhibition and to accompany two other solo shows – mélanger les lumières at the Dulcie Galerie at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (4 March–11 April) and liquider les contours at the Villa Tamaris art centre at Seyne-sur-Mer (19 September–8 November) – Galerie Jean Fournier has joined forces with these venues and the publishing house Analogues to issue a monograph containing texts by Michel Pastoureau, Christine Lapostolle, Claire Nédellec and Jean-Marc Huitorel, together with an illustrated, annotated biography.