A privileged place for emotion

Bruno Dufourmantelle places painting at the center of reality, and spends all his capital of emotion and sensitivity around it. Each of his paintings seems to suggest the totality of reality, while at the same time being only a part of that totality. Why painting? "Because it's a way of bringing matter down to the level of the senses... Painting only interests me if it can enable me to have a relationship with others of that order.

Bruno Dufourmantelle is annoyed by the concept of painting, which he feels presides over all forms of creation today, and seeks to unravel the mystery of his own emotions through the act of painting. His argument is crystal-clear: painting conceals a host of surprises. It is the confused reality that we recompose. Painting is a moment of withdrawal from oneself, and the gesture is the conductor of a subtle music held as close to the essential as possible, when all that's left is color and light. A canvas, he says, "ends up standing on nothing. Working with color is as precise as working with a note.

And it is indeed light that he begins to work on in his paintings, using a process (he integrates small pieces of paper of varying value into the still-fresh paint, right down to small gold leaves), This process is as good as any other, and would not be worth our attention were it not for the fact that it allows the background of paint deposited on the canvas to resurface and rise to the surface, in a back-and-forth movement between matte and gloss, and thus allows the artist to begin his painting by immediately addressing the problem of light...

Then comes color, mingled with gesture. Bruno Dufourmantelle paints with his fingers: "There's something primal in painting, like the trace of a footstep in the earth.

In his studio, he has very little space in which to work and see his canvases, but he appreciates the density of these large surfaces that resist him and into which "you have to push doors"... as if there were no other possible way of finding the one thing that interests him - a relationship with the other of the emotional order - than through a primal act that only painting can account for.

Bruno Dufourmantelle seems to think that, like the artists who most influenced him, Giacometti and Rothko - and from whom he seems so far removed today - painting is the only way to capture emotion, and that it is a privileged place to do so, as the contradictions between impulses and concepts are embedded in a kind of dance or playful movement. Among other dice rolls, the one that abolished the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration has enabled him today to attempt this encounter between abstraction and the appearance, almost unbeknownst to him, of these bodies that have imposed themselves on him and which he doesn't want to "falsify", while seeking the means to "get behind the skin".

The choice to paint has a meaning. That it is the emergence of a new way of thinking, comparable to a sheet of paper, with emotion and sensitivity on the front and thought on the back, may astonish many, but that such insistence in a closed system such as the universe, But such insistence, in a closed system such as the universe, on the tendency of order - that of thought - towards disorder - that of emotion - considered in reality as the guarantor of a necessary balance in time - has the merit of being a very contemporary preoccupation, and of affirming the structure of today's artistic edifice...

Nadine Descendre
Beaux Arts - 1988