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PAST EXHIBITIONS
Lightspace
Bruno Dufourmantelle
October 2024
The work of Bruno Dufourmantelle is driven by a physical engagement with painting and its demand for an absolute plastic formulation. This is true both for the works explicitly titled “Battles” and for his recent paintings, where the image emerges from a visceral confrontation with the organic nature of materials and pictorial techniques: black backgrounds, light, colors, forms. “I start with black to bring the light forth.”
This dynamic is the essence of a body of work whose subjects do not preexist the material but arise from the void in the half-dry interplay of surface effects: “To seek beings within the painting through painting.” From a light-infused material shaped by brushes and blades, isolated forms emerge—difficult to identify or blurred together: bodies as rocks, bodies as horizons, bodies as landscapes. The hands, rendered with more detail, establish points of reference, while the bodies juxtapose their solitude and their secrets—neither unified nor separated.
Bruno Dufourmantelle’s work occupies the space where the initial distinction between realism and abstraction dissolves and becomes blurred—the background and the figure consume each other—in his exploration of the act of painting. His canvases thus form a memory of painting, referencing what the gesture can produce in emotional turbulence, how color creates endless constructions and spaces, and how texture becomes immediacy and an affirmed material presence. The artist explicitly engages with what is irreducible in painting—its relationship with the invisible and the unintelligible: “To first seek the interiority of beings and the invisible... the paintings are interior spaces.” He offers a demonstration—echoing a musical mode—that painting is a powerful substitute for emotional and expressive depth.
Angeline Scherf, Chief Curator at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
