PARIS.- The Galerie Nathalie Obadia is presenting the third solo exhibition of the work of Guillaume Bresson in its new gallery in rue du Bourg Tibourg.
Ten or so paintings of different format will be shown beneath the gallery’s glass roof. These works have their origin in a series of perspectival grids traced ex nihilo, in which the position of the horizon line has been shifted at random. The resulting “structures” serve as the framework for the development of the works in which architectures gradually take form and bodies substance. Scraps of narrative become discernible and relate to one another, suggestive of the aesthetic typical of videogames and 3D animation as much as settings characteristic of the Italian Renaissance.
The motifs that appear have their origin in the real world: children, women, men, gestures, objects from everyday life, a football pitch, and so on. This new iconographic form is combined with the experimental technique of painting some of the works on wood panels, a rigid support never previously used by Bresson.
One composition suggests a ballet of figures inside a fast food outlet, like so many dancers in a musical. Pared down settings – no man’s lands – with insignificant architectural elements (postmodern avatars bordering on pastiche) against which figures materialize in the throes of the non-events of daily life, like a young man returning from the supermarket with his shopping, another picking up a wrapper from the ground, others frozen as they are caught in a purposeless wait.
These uncomplimentary situations, these unheroic events taking place in the dormitory suburbs gripped by the boredom of the middle classes – though allied with the beauty springing from the artist’s brush – emanate a poetics of banality, an aesthetic of the outskirts shot through with echoes of Houllebecq.
Elsewhere, the silhouette of a man bending over blends with the rounded profile of a scooter. The figure becomes one with the machine, creating a bionic man, a contemporary chimera, the figure of a centaur in reverse whose appearance in the space of the work seems to stem from organic laws of painting more than from a requirement for narrative. Rather than the staging of a guiding narration, Guillaume Bresson’s viewpoint is articulated in a manner of painting the world that surrounds him. He envisages his subject as a construction in process, interrupted in each painting and continued in the next, reaching towards an end that is never achieved. He thus presents us with the “adventure of a painting” rather than the “painting of an adventure”, entifying in the pictorial field the famous definition of the Nouveau Roman.
Born in Toulouse in 1982, Guillaume Bresson lives and works in Toulouse and Paris.
A graduate with honours of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, he left the school in 2007. His work questions the notions of scene-setting and narration in painting. Discovered by the public at large at the Dynasty exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010 – the year he won the Sciences-Po Prize for contemporary art – his work has since been shown on many occasions in such international institutions as the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (Lumière Noire exhibition) and the Mudam in Luxembourg, which bought one of his most important paintings in 2011.
In 2013 and 2014, Guillaume Bresson participated in the second edition of “Belle Peinture”, organized by the Institut Français in Slovakia and in Mauritius, and in several group shows at the Perm Museum in Russia, the Domaine départemental de Chamarande and at the Palais des Arts de Dinard, notably the “Festin de l’art” curated by Jean-Jacques Aillagon. In 2014 Guillaume Bresson published an artist’s book with éditions Dinard. He has been approached by the Nouveaux Commanditaires to respond to a commission from the Red Star Football Club of Saint-Ouen, a project that will be inaugurated in 2015.
