In Fontevraud, a surprising Bernard Buffet exhibited

Some exhibitions succeed in changing our minds about an artist. This is one of them. At first glance, its stretched characters, prickly like thistles, scratched with sickly streaks and cross-hatching, can be off-putting. As the gloomy atmosphere of a certain number of his works, or even his more “commercial” and colorful productions, such his clown portraitsnot recommended for phobics.

“There is, it’s true, a dimension of attraction-repulsion in his painting,” admits Dominique Gagneux, director of the Fontevraud Museum of Modern Art and curator of the exhibition. But this extensive journey first reveals one thing: Bernard Buffet was a good painter. In addition to his prolific inventiveness, he was technically gifted, knew how to develop a unique style, immediately recognizable, which allowed him to produce strong images. The course also demonstrates the great diversity of its corpus (rich with more than 10,000 works, produced from the 1940s to 1999) as well as its astonishing paradoxes…

Between medieval art and contemporary echoes

Very influenced by medieval art, Buffet produced in the early 1950s large christ paintings, including a crucifixion, presented in the exhibition. The gnarled and thin bodies, surrounded by black, as well as the crosses and the dark figures which stand out against a background of pale light, express all the austerity of the scene and the suffering of Christ. The whole thing in a very contemporary style.