Stéphane Bordarier, Back After Play

After Toulouse (Galerie Jean-Paul Barrès, March 17th—May 15th, 2021), Stéphane Bordarier is showing his recent paintings in Paris (Galerie ETC, June 2nd —July 24th, and September 2021); while in Montpellier the Musée Fabre is offering, thanks to new acquisitions and donations, a chronological overview of his work with a group of eight paintings from 1983 to 2016 ( Stéphane Bordarier: Une Collection, May-August 2021).

The current wealth of events dedicated to Stéphane Bordarier provides an ideal opportunity to consider the place of his work in the history of painting. At a time when, after having been declared dead, painting is making a comeback, mostly in the form of a return to the figure; at a time when, when we speak of abstraction, it is precisely to underline its “impure” (1) character, so much so that a new generation of artists is constantly reshuffling the old cards of the abstraction/figuration couple; the presentation of Bordarier’s work over a long period of time allows us to bring to light not only the singularity of his approach, but also the role of this work in the writing of the history of abstract painting.

PAINTING BY REDUCTION

For Bordarier, painting as an act and as a commitment was and remains a question of situation: not a solitary act, but a way of intervening consciously in a field in order to produce modification. This was true very early on, when Bordarier, born in Beaucaire in 1953, joined the Jean Fournier gallery at the end of the 1980s, where he was confronted with figures and works as important as those of Joan Mitchell, Simon Hantaï and James Bishop. From the outset he had to find his own path. Bordarier’s has been a constant one: neither evasive nor imitative. Not evasive, because this artist has always shown a voracious, even devouring curiosity about the history of his art, which led him to practice a form of active, joyful digestion of everything that could nourish his work. The best way to resist the power of the work of a Joan Mitchell, who had become a friend in the meantime, wasn’t only to look at her work, but also to add to those views so many other fruitful perspectives. What better resistance could there be to striking works than other works? Loving Mitchell’s painting, Bordarier never stopped looking at Hantaï’s. Practising what is known as abstract work, the artist has spent an essential part of his life looking at Italian painting of the Quattrocento, spending a year in Perugia in 1993-94 to see all that Umbria and Tuscany had to offer in the way of resources. Looking is as important as painting for painters who are thus nourished.Yet Bordarier never bases his work on any form of imitation. Assimilation isn’t an end in itself, but a moment in a pursuit where consideration goes hand in hand with disencumberment. What appear today as the major stages in the establishment of his painting show this. The look of most of his paintings—a single shape, in a single colour, spread over the surface of a square canvas, without covering the whole of it —is the result of a succession of achievements by reduction. Bordarier has put a lot into his painting, because he has looked a lot, experienced a lot, lived a lot, in order to better remove, in order to find what was necessary for him to paint: this congruent portion in which resides, for him, the quality of his painting.

GLUING TIME

This determination of a pictorial syntax by means of a practice that associates taking into account and subtraction has passed through essential stages. First, in 1991, two contemporary and fundamentally related “decisions” were made: the construction of the painting from a single shape, where previous works had involved several shapes of different appearance, texture and colour; and the elaboration of what he called a “surface quality”, which was constructed as a rejection of the material, and was elaborated in a “method” close to the fresco technique, consisting of spreading the colour in the still warm glue primer, during the time of “setting”, which is to say during the time that the glue, as it dries, allows it to act in this way. In Bordarier’s work the colour doesn’t seem to be applied to the canvas, but taken from its field, this withdrawal having all the quality of a little. As we can see, the quality of shape and surface are linked, one—the shape—being the manifestation of the other. In 1992, in his Journal (2) he notes: “My painting is a quality of the ’skin’ of the canvas. A

quality without quality, everything but the thickness, the ’crust’.” What began in 1991 with the adoption of a single form, a first step identified by the artist as laying the foundations of a personal syntax, culminated in 1996 in the adoption of Mars Violet as the colour destined to function, for years to come, as the sole colour. Here again, such a choice was motivated by the painter’s feeling that in it he encountered what for him condensed the “quality of colour” he was looking for.

Although it is possible in retrospect to identify, the stages in the establishment of his painting, there is no teleology that would allow us, as so many painters of the modern avant-garde did, to formulate a Bordarier system. “One-track thinking bores me”, he says. Although Mars Violet may have seemed to serve as the culmination of this work, what followed proved to have another status: that of the culmination of the work of reducing painting to a kind of fertile minimum, rid of what encumbered it, and all the more available for the unknown that might come. Once the “qualities” have been found, with them comes the freedom to play with them. The method excludes neither surprise, nor accident, nor adventure. The works that came after Mars Violet never ceased to show a desire to move forward: to keep a single shape and colour, while bringing in something else.

RISING FROM BENEATH

These playful alterations around a constant centre are at work in the works shown in Paris. Two sets, produced between 2018 and 2019, are shown side by side: a series using an indigo blue on linen canvas, and a second set on a white acrylic preparation. In the first

De gauche à droite / from left:

« 5.VII. 2011 ». Huile sur toile / oil on canvas. 140 x 280 cm. « 1991 ». Acrylique, encre et colle sur toile / acrylic, ink and glue on canvas. 199 x 224 cm. « IX.2000 (3) ». Huile sur toile / oil on canvas. 198 x 203 cm. Exposition / exhibition « Stéphane Bordarier, une collection ». (© Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole ; Ph. Frédéric Jaulmes)

case, the painter played on the colour of the linen canvas, which is very present, transforming the painted colour underneath, while at the same time acting alongside it.The blue is muted, with a slightly greenish aspect mixed in.

IMPOSSIBLE JUXTAPOSITIONS Elsewhere Bordarier sought a different surface quality. On the yellow, ultramarine or purple paints, a physically visible mixture takes place in the course of the work between the acrylic white of the preparation and the colour. Strokes of the spatula scrape the white and mix it with the surface colour, tracing the elements of fabrication, the gesture, and the vagaries of execution. The colour is then a drawn compound, within which swirls, spikes, stripes and splashes follow one another. In the paintings of previous years, these movements were hardly visible. Here they are brought to the fore: asserted as an element of the final surface.The randomness of the contours, which appeared in 2013, has now taken over the coloured surface itself. These are, says the painter, paintings “made in one go”, but the time of execution is perceptible in the mixing of the layers, in the rise of the background (white) for some or the perception of the background (linen canvas) for others. The background is thus never a background, and the colour of the form never just “on top”.

It is, says Bordarier, the “mixture of styles” that concerns him, “the possibility of keeping the single form, the single colour, but the multiplicity in the treatment of this unity. The possibility of painting this form alone, but with this work made of accidents and chances claimed within the form itself, and of coming up from beneath. I would like this ‘magmatic’ character to manifest itself in the always unique, heavy form of a single surface of colour.” There is an eroticism of mixing in this painter’s work: a way of putting the components of his work back into play in order to generate something new. And what about abstraction? What is its role in this “magmatic” painting?The artist offers us the answer with the choice of this term: it is part of the history of his paintings, without ever encompassing or qualifying them. Bordarier doesn’t paint abstract pictures, he paints with and after abstraction. Just as one might say that he paints with and after the fresco painting of the Quattrocento, among others. Impurity is the quality of magmatic painting. It is because he has this strong awareness of the history of painting, and of his position as a painter within it, that he does this. Abstraction is part of the heritage he has chosen for himself, but with so many other resources, which belong to the history of art as well as to his personal history, to things seen and things experienced. Some he knows, others he doesn’t, but all of them work on him.

As we can see, situating Bordarier cannot be reduced to a game of belonging. What he looks at feeds him, without ever taking hold of him or encapsulating him. If his path has crossed that of other artists, no reference is ever worth a resemblance for this man who confronts others the better to achieve his freedom. After spending a year looking at Italian painting, it was in himself that the artist found Mars Violet, as if this vast quest had no other purpose than to strengthen him in his singular choices. When asked what he is looking at the moment, he answers Malcolm Morley. Why? For the possibility of juxtaposing things that are impossible to imagine together, managing to hold them together as a single thing. Stéphane Bordarier’s current situation couldn’t be better described.

Translation: Chloé Baker

1 See Romain Mathieu, “Abstractions impures”, artpress n° 485, February 2021. 2 To be published at the end of the year by L’Atelier Contemporain.

Pierre Wat is Professor of Art History at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I. A specialist in European Romanticism, he is also the author of studies on contemporary art. Latest published works: Pérégrinations. Paysages entre nature et histoire (Hazan, 2017), and Hans Hartung, la peinture pour mémoire (Hazan, 2019).

Stéphane Bordarier

Né en / born in 1953 à / in Beaucaire

Vit et travaille à / lives and works in Nîmes Représenté par / represented by galerie ETC, Paris, et galerie Barrès, Toulouse

Expositions personnelles récentes /

Recent solo shows:

2017 Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris

2016 L’adresse du Printemps de septembre, Toulouse 2015 Cycle Des histoires sans fin, Mamco, Genève ; Galerie Béa-Ba, Marseille

2014 Lee Ahn Gallery, Séoul ; Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris ; Galleria Peccolo, Livourne

Expositions collectives récentes /

Recent group shows:

2020 The Painting People, Atelier Michael Woolworth, Paris

2019 La Composante peintures,

Frac Bretagne, Rennes

2015 One More Time, Mamco, Genève