We had to dare to exhibit the painter Guillaume Bresson at the Palace of Versailles. At 43, this Toulouse resident living in New York became known for his scenes of urban violence. By offering him his first retrospective (1), Christophe Leribault chose to confront him directly with the large paintings of the African rooms, commissioned by King Louis-Philippe from Horace Vernet to exalt the colonial conquest. Works considered embarrassing today and often hidden, even though they “are not unrelated, believes the president of the Palace of Versailleswith the brutality of spaces relegated to the outskirts of cities”, represented by Bresson.
Inspired by baroque painting
The artist tackled these subjects while studying at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. “There were riots in 2002 in Toulouse, in Paris in 2005. I wanted to transpose these tensions into painting. I took photos of my Toulouse friends in movement, to then recompose them on the canvas, like a choreographer. he explains. A memory of the breakdancing that this teenage graffiti artist indulged in? Fascinated at the Louvre by the baroque painting of Poussin and Caravaggio, Guillaume Bresson also took up the eloquent poses and the violent chiaroscuro.
On loan from the Mudam of Luxembourg, his first riot painting, painted in grisaille in 2006, shows a crowd of people at the foot of building bars, armed with molotov cocktails and batons, overturning a car in the middle of the smoke. It is difficult in Versailles not to think of the revolutionary crowds who invaded the castle in 1789. Certain details – a brandished flag, a threatening arm or clashing bodies – also refer directly to the colonial battles depicted by Vernet.
“Shows him the point of view of the dominant, me that of the dominated, but it’s the same violence that is reproduced,” believes Guillaume Bresson. And if its concrete architectures, under pale neon lights, contrast with the insolated landscapes of North Africa, it is because today “violence also comes from places”, he emphasizes.
-Cinematic points of view
In a nod to cinema, its frontal staging, its way of sometimes zooming in on a body-to-body encounter seems to take us as witnesses, here of a face-to-face between two rival gangs, there of assault of a woman in a parking lot. Even when the painter allows himself saturated colors and a panoramic tracking shot to capture the streets of Los Angeles or a funfair at Le Tréport, he hides nothing behind the scenes: the tents of the homeless under the palm trees, a brawl in front of bumper cars…
What do his last paintings mean where muscular bodies fall in the sky, recalling The Fall of the Damned of Rubens? A reversal of all this violent masculinity? For the past year, Guillaume Bresson has been working alongside a Apotheosis of Saint Eustace for the church dedicated to this saint in Paris. Between collapse and elevation, two forms of a sudden letting go…
