The work of Bruno Dufourmantelle is marked by a kind of hand-to-hand struggle with painting and what it implies in terms of absolute formal expression; this is true both for the canvases explicitly titled “Battles” and for more recent works, where the image is born from a physical confrontation with the organic aspects of materials and painterly techniques: black ground, light, colors, forms. “I begin with black grounds in order to bring forth the light.”

It is this dynamic that constitutes the true quality of his work, in which subjects do not preexist the material but emerge from emptiness in the semi-wet state of surface effects: “To seek out beings in painting through painting.” From a luminous material worked with brushes and blades, isolated forms emerge—hard to identify or merging together: bodies as rocks, bodies as horizon lines, bodies as landscapes. The hands, more detailed, create points of reference, while the bodies juxtapose their solitudes and their secrets—neither united nor separate. Bruno Dufourmantelle’s work occupies that space where the initially clear distinction between realism and abstraction dissolves and blurs—the background and the figure devour one another—within the exploration of painterly practice. His canvases thus form a memory of painting, referring to the emotional turbulence that gesture can produce, the constructions and infinite spaces that color can create, and the thickness of paint as an immediacy and an affirmed material presence. The artist explicitly refers to what painting conveys that is irreducible, in its relationship with the invisible and the unintelligible: “To seek first the interiority of beings and the invisible… paintings are inner spaces.” He offers us a demonstration—echoing musical form—that painting is a powerful substitute for depth of emotion and expression.

Angeline Scherf, Chief Curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris