The monochrome paintings of Stéphane Bordarier are the result of a research based on the quality of the pictorial surface and the founding role of color. This monograph offers an overview of recent works, followed by two interviews with the artist by
Erik Verhagen.
"The time it takes to make a painting is made up of the action of painting plus time spent in contemplation, which accompanies and follows it. I willingly allow myself—and I even actively seek—to be carried away in the momentum of a 'series' of paintings: this is the only way that unexpected, non-thought things can enter into it and push it forward. It happens when you get to the point where you no longer know you're in the middle of making a painting, where the act breaks away and, in its relative autonomy, lets things happen. A familiar tune, whose transcendent aspect must not be trusted. Of course, this non-thought must then become thought! In this way it confronts its own era, the history of painting and philosophy, and the work of other artists. The more severe the confrontation, the more the position I have just described in paintings may be perceived for what it is. What is decidedly more interesting again is that it's in the very act of painting-beyond-the-canvas that a part of this contemplation occurs, in a totally unconscious and certainly the sharpest manner, which brings a maximum of things into question."
Stéphane Bordarier, interview with Erik Verhagen
Born in 1953, Stéphane Bordarier lives and works in Nîmes. Since the early 1980s, he has been exploring the ways in which color can occupy and shape a surface. Drawing inspiration from the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, from postwar American abstraction, from the tradition of the Italian fresco, and from the essential figures of Matisse and the great European painters, Bordarier has developed an original approach that stands out within the contemporary art landscape. His work is grounded in a principle of economy and precision, engaging a dynamic tension between constraint and freedom.
