Some perspectives on painting: Borgeaud - Frize - Varini: Geneva

Olivier Varenne Art Moderne & Contemporain presents Bernard Borgeaud in a group show with Bernard Frize, and Felice Varini – artists who both have also pushed visual and material boundaries in their careers. As summed up by Jean-Hubert Martin: “Single vanishing point perspective dominated painting from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. The usual response of modernity has consisted of respecting the flatness of the support and not to try to create an illusion of space. These three painters offer new solutions to this question”.

Foreword by Jean-Hubert Martin, exhibition co-curator: 

Single vanishing point perspective dominated painting from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. The usual response of modernity has consisted conversely of respecting the flatness of the support and not to try to create an illusion of space. These three painters offer new solutions to this question.

The rejection of representation is the foundation of modern painting. The invention of perspective and its incredible ability to represent space on the painted surface has become so familiar to us that it passes for an achievement of value to all forms of art, whereas the opposite is true. The centuries of painting since the Renaissance are an exception in the History of Art. This type of visual belief has contributed to establishing both the hegemony of the West over the rest of the world and its mastery of nature. Even the Emperor of China called upon European Jesuits to depict his armies and his battles. A mimetic form of painting became the major artistic discipline, the other arts being relegated to the rank of applied arts or crafts. This taxonomy is unfortunately so rooted in our way of seeing that it hinders the development of a new discourse capable of encompassing the arts of all parts of the world.

By referring to all sorts of examples from other cultures, artists have, for a century, been constantly developing new paradigms to combat the idea that art can be reduced to the image of a view from a window. Two major routes then offered themselves to artists: either free themselves from painting and use other materials and other techniques, or remain faithful to painting and deepen its foundations. This last solution gave birth to abstract painting which itself split into a lyrical, expressionist path, and an analytical path which reflects on its bases and origins.

Three examples of the latter direction are shown here by three different artists: Bernard Borgeaud, Bernard Frize and Felice Varini.

Bernard Borgeaud reduces his reflection on painting to three fundamental elements: form, colour and gesture. He ends with Alberti’s window and its inseparable quadrilateral. The canvases are stretched on frames in elaborate shapes according to the desired objective. This creates a dynamic focal concentration, as if the reviled traditional perspective was represented by the direction of the coloured lines converging towards a putative eye. The conventional relationship between the painting and the wall intended to receive it is totally transformed. Instead of being in the middle of the wall, it rests partially on the ground. Colours carefully selected in advance from refined charts and diagrams, are then applied using gestures close to action painting, sometimes on segments determined by stencils.