Bertrand Beaussillon
The transfigured night
A black square lightly touched with amber at its base, with transparence. A medial opening of subtle verticality, crossed by a yellow barely sustained, like the echo of a light through a partly-opened door. Night opens onto a prolonged daydream, a room, an intimate space. Careful meditation on the composition leads to the discovery of small peripheral glimmers, soft darts of orange, yellow modulating towards neighboring color values.
Bertrand Beaussillon’s pictorial approach becomes clear in this composition: work devoid of all dissonance and imbued with a harmony so enveloping that it suggests the tenets of an integral pictorial universe. Emerging from nocturnal elements, this painting speaks to us of night transfigured-by a rejection of sentimentality, and by sparing use of gestures and cries favored by those compelled by the world’s chaos.
Here we find velvet blacks, yellows liberated from the crassness of complaints. Immediately we are in the universe of silence. The disquiet of each day is sufficient: there is no need for overstatement. The canvases create the space of a meditative path, fed by nocturnal innocence. One dreams, if the association is permitted, of the musical compositions that Frederico Mompou entitled Musica callada: Music-Approaching-Silence.
Fundamentally stripped down – wich is not to say that they employ once-fashionable minimalist reflexes – the compositions of Bertrand Beaussillon are exactingly constructed. This is their paradox, but also the key to their enigmatic power to fascinate. Though the graphic dimension is attenuated by surface transitions of remarkable subtlety, all of his canvases employ an organizing structure, like en embedded watermark, an underlying framework, or an image wich lingers on the mind’s eye.
A consummate architect, the artist remains so in his ability to suggest an interior without recourse to the figure, employing only transparence, harmonic rigor and an exploration of extremes. A childhood room perhaps, where the light is transversal, a fugitive ray as if through a frosted pane ? Or a makeshift attic pervaded by restless shafts of light and twilight remembrances ?
Throughout its development, the painting of Beaussillon insists on a coherent approach: remaining faithful to itself while at the same time exploring, in stages of increasing complexity, forms inhabited by a quiet feverishness or moments of instability. This gives rise to gaps, ever sharper angles, frames split at their center. Harmony is thus enlarged: even if black is the work’s armature, the artist mitigates it with thrusts of vermilion, sweeps of orange, unexpected surges of pink or light crimson. Careful experimentation unfolds beneath our eyes: a patience and attention to detail that define a maturing style.
The indwelling of dreams in soft half-light: such is the pictorial universe engendered by the passion of the painter. Is one surprised if one encounters at times the almost disconcerting « apparition » of a feminine silhouette whose nudity is not reduced to a set of pictorial conventions, but gives intimacy its true quality of dream and sensuality. In an early canvas we are already caught off guard by the outline, at the limits of abstraction, of a delightfully unexpected erotic allusion.
If Beaussillon’s first room evoked an aesthetic of almost-nothingness, recent compositions progressively take on fugitive intrusions, passionate eruptions, rumors, and warmer colors. The night begins to vibrate as in certain string quartets by Bartok where the noises of a summer garden insinuate themselves into a house’s interior. The work of the artist reminds us without fanfare: painting is patience, clarity, renewal.
Thus the paintings evoke the mistery of existence, at the border of these nocturnal destinies tamed for us in the painter’s act of re-transcription.
Jean LIBIS
November 2003
Translation : Ellen Hinsey