Expression in muted snatches

As though it were incomplete, the eye has to quit its usual mapped-out paths, the lethargy of customary precautions, if it is to conquer, step by step, the outlines of the landscapes proposed by Bernard Bygodt. For it is there that his rythm unfurls and quivers. Radiant landscapes in black and white. Though smooth in appearance, their coherence is made up of a particular roughness. His strength, however insubordinate it may be, remains nevertheless, a force of consentment. The black and the white light up the canvas with the same energy. So that the tensions mobilised therein and the unity which emerges therefrom become unstable and unpredictable.

The white is light in the form of a river, of fire, of a desert ; the black tightens up the motifs as though it were a syntax of isles, of bushes and dunes.

Black and white are rich in colour, colour that is dense in its relief, inscribed in between the look and the hand, these colours bear witness to the intensity of Bernard Bygodt's work ; thereby developing its intelligence at the very moment where it shakes off all the constraints imposed by his own memory.

The very act of painting, even in its exertion, is an exhaustion, as though it were a form of exaltation, and condenses all of this painting, its fearful obsessions, its techniques, its highways and byways, and becomes lighter, then, because of all of this. Inluences, souvenirs, are put to the test, assumed, refined, transformed.

The mastery of his approach is affirmed, gains weight through the reliability of his technique. It is by stripping away the elements that the painter invents a new lease of life, a rythm, a route. Each of his paintings opens up a way to a kind of short story which itself prolongs its momentum, its self-evident strength. The eye, self assured certainly, but nevertheless a little confused and failing somewhat in its interpretation of the work, thinks that it has captured here a turning point, there a drifting, here a reprise. But each canvas can be developed as a surprise, modifying the way in which it can be looked at, by intersecting its various meanings. This blending of urgency and mastery of gest demands a respectful attention ; the painting isn't figurative here or abstract there ; it is itself its own subject, its own project. It is given neither to exhibition, nor to imitation, nor to representation.

Bernard Bygodt's painting doesn't seek to flatter the eye neither does it seek to abuse it with delusions. It stimulates it, calls upon it to traverse long backward movements and great distances in the opposite direction. It opens up passages towards the unexpected, the unhoped for. Without doubt it rides roughshod over old habits and conventional ways of seeing. Seeing is to renew oneself to one's own history, one's own identity. Each one of us is, in this sense, alone in seeing. Thought is indissolubly linked to looking. It finds there a more lively sense of gravity and euphoria. This link, then, is not only symbolic, it is also physical.

Resignation and oblivion can only be fertile if that which is seen by the eye is cast in the same mould. To look at this work is to find common ground with the painter who is watchful of its limits. Within its frame and within its limits, each one of these paintings weaves new combinations, invents a tempo and a reliability that remain inimitable.

Jean-Claude ANNEZER
Head Curator of the Toulouse City Libraries
Extracts from the exhibition catalogue « Bernard Bygodt - Paintings » B.I.U. Toulouse December 1993

English Translation by David MARSHALL
Service du Patrimoine de la Ville de Gaillac