Stéphane Bordarier – Pierre Buraglio – Jean Degottex – Simon Hantaï – Sam Francis – Shirley Jaffe – Frédérique Lucien – Marcelle Loubchansky – Joan Mitchell – Bernard Piffaretti – Jean-Paul Riopelle – Josef Sima – Kimber Smith – Claude Viallat

« Big and Small Paintings in Memory of Jean Fournier » is a tribute to the gallery’s founder and the choices he made between his initial venture on Avenue Kléber in 1954 and his death in 2006. The exhibition has been designed as a dialogue between the different generations of artists who crossed paths at the gallery, from Josef Sima to Bernard Piffaretti and from Simon Hantaï to Frédérique Lucien.

            These are pictures that Jean Fournier actually saw and admired. Some of them were given to him as gifts, while others were shown in exhibitions at the gallery in its different locations: Avenue Kléber, Rue du Bac and Rue Quincampoix.

Common to these artists is a particular concern with colour and space, but above all they shared a passionate, responsive way of being in the world. To present them together like this is also to chronicle the history of the gallery in all its change and constancy. In the course of time Galerie Jean Fournier became a touchstone, a place where painting and abstraction were uncompromisingly defended – and still are today. The exhibition unspools the thread of Fournier’s emblematic encounters with artists who went on to become major 20th-century figures, among them Simon Hantaï and Joan Mitchell; and points up the links with such American artists as Sam Francis and Shirley Jaffe, and with the painterly avant-gardes of the 1960s–1970s as personified by Claude Viallat and Pierre Buraglio.

            Fournier’s receptiveness towards the following generations – Stéphane Bordarier, Frédérique Lucien, Bernard Piffaretti – opened up new programming avenues and helped forge the gallery’s identity as we now know it. Since his passing in 2006 the gallery has continued to champion new artists working in abstraction or kindred veins. It still flies the flag of the variety he was so attached to: Fournier was a passionate ambassador both for the art of the past and that of his own time, a gifted go-between whose measured but implacable eye left its mark on generations of artists, curators and collectors.

            The handsomest gesture of esteem we can offer Jean Fournier is to hold firmly and sincerely to his course of action, for the sake both of the artists and those who support them.

« Fundamentally the truest fidelity one can show towards Fournier and what he built is expressed in his own definition: expect nothing, hope for everything. This meant dropping the ethos of resemblance in favour of serendipity . . . That, finally, is the Fournier line: successive generations endlessly casting new light on each other, and all within the same household. »

The exhibition will be accompanied by a generously illustrated booklet including archival material and a text by Pierre Wat in French and English

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.

This new solo exhibition comprises a group of paintings of various sizes: 178 x 203 cm, 140 x 140 cm and smaller ones of 40 x 40 cm. All of them date from 2013.

Nourished both by the 1960-70s avant-garde and the painting of the quattrocento, Bordarier works according to a fixed set of rules, voluntary constraints which nonetheless allow for a host of chromatic and formal variations. He covers a stretched canvas with rabbit-skin glue, then adds the paint while the glue is still drying. His work is thus embedded in time: he says he is ‘driven out’ of the canvas by the drying process and its dictating of the finishing of the picture. It is as if colour and form are crystallised. For most of the pictures on display here, the artist has first overlaid the glue with a thin coat of white acrylic.

While still adhering to the painterly principles Bordarier first developed in the 1980s, this new series differs in its alternation of two colours prepared by the artist himself: mars violet, which he has been using since 1996 and knows ‘by heart’, and copper sulphate, a source of numerous transparency effects. « In a self-imposed pendulum movement the artist moves in turn through territories known and unknown; he likes to lay down rules as a way of triggering the unexpected. »[1] The matte quality of these paints is akin to that of fresco. Here form and colour are one. Bordarier’s use of a square or near-square format enables enormous freedom: with neither top nor bottom, it condenses form.

Each painting involves covering almost the entire canvas with a single colour. There are, too, more or less extensive reserved areas, which clip off edges and give the painting its shape. A shape which, depending on the picture, can emerge as cursive and drawn or, on the contrary, more massive and close to square, grazing the boundaries of the canvas and often spilling over onto the edge of the stretcher.

In contrast with the period 2004–2010, when Bordarier was exploring different modes of association between canvases, this exhibition comprises only individual, autonomous works. For him this is a return to fundamentals, to his artistic roots.

There is no place for subject matter or any element of expressionism in this artist’s practice. This is an oeuvre rooted in colour and its reflection of light. Stéphane Bordarier’s aim is to maintain the intensity and eloquence of his resources as he explores his new territories in a body of work whose trajectory is one of originality and freedom.