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Daniel Bruniaux

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Although they sometimes, very rarely, border on abstraction, Bruniaux's paintings are always self-portraits (it's the main reason for their man-size dimensions : 110 x 90, 120 x 100, 130 x 110) ; usually, self-portraits (even the most daring, the most modern, let's say Bacon), find it enough to represent a figure (and what's more, no matter how much deformed or stylized, an identifiable figure) standing out against a neutral background (dualism and hierarchies already) ; with Bruniaux, the figure is, firstly unrecognizable (face absent or cut down to a few traces, the nose bridge in particular), secondly always caught up in a web of different contexts, thirdly so tightly entwined in the background that one simply cannot talk of background anymore ; here the self-portrait is always also a landscape ; the reason why figure and background have to be so entwined on canvas is that, in the real world, our sensations and perceptions always come both from inside and outside : they burst forth in unison, interpenetrate, intermingle inextricably ; it's not the features of the artist that are represented, his outward appearance, his person, his psychology, because all this, stable, defined, would inevitably lead to, no matter how beautiful, a description, an image ; Bruniaux is a painter of the moving; he doesn't paint things or states or situations, but processes, and fugitive, fleeting processes at that : a total lived-through spot in time ; he paints his outside body, his inside body and both their instantaneous perceptions : something utterly short-lived, a snapshot of that simultaneousness of perceptions coming from inside on one hand (hence those shreds of flesh, nerves, ligaments, articulations), coming from outside on the other (through the 5 senses, sight in particular ; hence those fragments from the surrounding world ; hence, too, that missing face : without mirror, it's a part of oneself impossible to see, with the exception of, precisely, the nose bridge ) ; as if the painter, splitting himself in two, was seeing his own ghost pass by, and just had the time to catch a few glimpses of it... painting so to speak spectrographical, in both acceptations of the word... Every Bruniaux painting is a faceless self-portrait, rooted in the organic, not physiognomical but physiological, not to say phenomenological, objective, almost scientific : a scan of inside sensations coupled with a kaleidoscope of outside perceptions ; if the accent is on the former, the work will be rather abstract ; on the latter, rather figurative ; a matter of proportions... but both are always there, more than mixed : in deep symbiosis ; for Bruniaux, the question is never to paint oneself only, but to paint a snapshot of perceptions with me perceiving them.

Still, the first originality of Bruniaux is not to give his perceptions time to form : he takes them in limbo, newly-born, in their larval state, still fleeting, obscure, undefined ; he works in that no man's land between the moment when his senses, literally taken by surprise, have perceived something, and the following millisecond when his brain will decode that someting ; it's a question of snapshots taken in that tiny gap, lightnings, flashes, fulgurations whose main part will be to start or restart the pictural process ; elementary particles of a genesis which above all mustn't materialize, for that would necessarily mean sinking back down again into an already-explored kind of figuration, and so, once again, into something fixed, set, stable ; every painting is in movement toward something that it takes good care not to reach, for it would mean the end of the movement ; Bruniaux seeks, but doesn't want to find ; he doesn't complete his painting, he interrupts it : he leaves its movement in abeyance... disappearing at the very moment of their appearance, one could talk about again and again unfinished self-portraits ; yes : spectral...

Registered: 2012-01-15

Location: Brussels

http://www.alltradeart.co.uk/daniel-bruniaux