22 Dec 2010

Marc Baufrere at Galerie Alain Blondel

Now living in China in the famous village of Song Zhuang near Beijing, the painter Marc Baufrère generates more and more interest from the Chinese institutions; he has recently had a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

His abstract painting is characterized by a fascination for matter, pictorial as well as physical: an attraction for embryonic shapes, accidents of matter and their poetic language. According to our imagination, his abstractions mutates in chaotic picturing of dark or organic matter, of some kind of magma. It is a world outside the human, in which everything is suggestion of pressure, temperature, volume and energy. The density and the telluric force of these momentums of paintings bring us a wonderment mingled with dread.

The dimensions of 130 x 160 cm, almost panoramic, let us get in the painting and above all observe the details of an infinite richness. The painter advises us to take a reading glass to examine the mysterious effects of matter. The depth of the painting is limitless; each piece opens on an infinite universe, an incommensurable space swarming with almost living matter. Marc Baufrère does not try to control his effects but, as the accident is part of his process, he creates an informal painting with natural echos, made of whirl splashed and of milky drips.

A connection with the dream-like landscapes of Yves Tanguy can be established but two paintings by Marc Baufrère pay tribute to Max Ernst in this exhibition. One can perceive the links between the 'frottages' of the Dada artist and the paintings by Baufrère; it is a method related to some kind of aic writing which reveal unknown shapes. The mental landscapes of Baufrère are peopled with ersatz of aliens, subaquatic dragons or creatures navigating in the meanders of our unconscious. He extracts some unspeakable and fleeting sensation that he translates in a complex abyssal space which paradoxically seems the reel picturing of what eyes of science has not enabled us to see yet.

Biography

Born in 1948 in Paris, he studies philosophy and cinema before working as a film-maker in France and Africa where he has set up the national television of Benin. Back in France, he directed a film of animated painting according to new processes and then created the company IMAGE IN, a firm for movies production and post-production. In the same time, he was international audiovisual expert to the U.N.

In 2003, he decides to devote himself to painting and begins to exhibit in France. For his moving to Beijing in 2008, he regularly exhibits in the Chinese galleries and public institutions.