The Limougeaud gallery owner therefore presents a third part devoted to Jean-Joseph Sanfourche, after the bronzes and the photomontages. This time it’s… painted bones.
It was in a letter he addressed to Jean Dubuffet in 1975 that the artist spoke for the first time about his painting on bones: “My hundreds of paintings and sculptures, some very beautiful and original, especially on bones human and those made with knapped flints found by me in Dordogne, it’s not bad.”
Surprise effect
Sanfourche uses bones as support. He paints on their surface with certain respect, then assembles them. The artist is only interested in ancient, even Neolithic, human bones. Undoubtedly a tribute to the people who know how to maintain a link with their ancestors, and their peace in the afterlife, through ritualized meditation on relics and Art.
Obviously, using this support would no longer be possible today. But it was in the 60s. “The artist was able to obtain human bones in auction rooms, or from archaeologists, or even in a Parisian store which sold bones for medical students, but also in Solignac, where he lived, through a religious friend, when bones were emerging on the ground of abandoned graves,” explains Vincent Pécaud. “He brings these elements out of oblivion and anonymity, giving them new life.”
Jean-Luc Thuillier, the painter's legatee and expert, explains Sanfourche's artistic motivations very well at this time of his life: “Very economical, he preserves the smallest chips as if they were precious stones. He weighs them down with plaster and gives them an expression, seeking an effect of surprise. Sanfourche shows himself to be both a researcher and an artisan, and makes playful use of skulls, an overmodeled composition of which was even reproduced in the newspaper Libération.
“Very economical, it preserves the smallest chips as if they were precious stones”
In 1995, the exhibition “Ghost and other ghosts”, organized by the general cultural office of Dordogne, proposed a cohabitation between skulls and stones painted by Sanfourche (series initiated thirty years earlier) with a painting by Robert Combas.
Some pieces exhibited at Pécaud were, in 2018, among the works by Sanfourche presented at the Musée d'Art Brut in Montpellier.
Sanfourche's fascination with painted bones is explained, according to Jean-Luc Thuillier, by the aesthetics linked to ancient shamanism and by black humor, with this parodic sense of the sacred that we find in the radicality of the performances of Michel Journiac (1943-1995). Sanfourche had also been in contact with this conceptual artist from the 70s, who placed death, the body and spirituality at the center of exuberant and provocative performances.
Little popular with art lovers
The painter's specialist recognizes, however, that “if sculpture and painting on bones give him great satisfaction, as if he wanted to resurrect the secret of magical rituals from the depths of the ages, they remain very little appreciated by lovers of art “.
Note that other magnificent pieces taken from Sanfourche's imagination, based on bones, plaster and stones, are permanently visible at the Eymoutiers town hall.
Expo. Galerie Vincent Pécaud, 21, rue Elie-Berthet, until February 28, 2025, Tuesday to Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 2:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Such. : 06.80.87.84.04 (exhibition completed with drawings, acrylics, bronzes, photomontages, enamels).
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