Pierre Buraglio

The Work

D’après… Auguste Radier (Le Grand Pin parasol)
(After… Auguste Radier [The Great Parasol Pine])
2003
184 x 177.5 cm / 72.4 x 69.8 in.
Oil on plywood

The title of the work, “D’après…”, refers to a series of drawings and paintings by Buraglio based on works by artists of the past: Poussin, Cézanne, Gauguin, and others.
Auguste Ravier was a 19th-century French landscape painter, a precursor of Impressionism, and a friend of Corot and Ingres, among others. The Great Parasol Pine is one of his works that Buraglio takes as a starting point to create something very different.
The artist’s initial decision was to work from an existing painting as if he were painting from nature. He takes as his natural motif not a landscape, a figure, or an urban view, but a painting made more than 100 years ago by another artist. He does not seek to reproduce a work of art but to create another. To do this, he selects parts of the work that inspire him, cuts them out, and recomposes them with his own plastic language.

The work consists of two parts in the form of a vertical diptych: the upper part, which is wider, with the large crown of the tree: a greenish pictorial mass that barely conceals the branches-nerves that spring from a large knot, half wound, half matrix. We highlight the bluish aura that surrounds it, as if the tree had captured the reflection of the sky in its silhouette. The lower part features a large light-colored rock on ground sloping to the right. A figure, perhaps female, anonymous, in profile and in shadow, leans on her left arm, which protrudes from the pictorial space. On the left, the dome of a small Mediterranean building stands out against the background.

The artist

(1939, Charenton-Le-Pont, França)

Pierre Buraglio has been active in the French art scene for over sixty years and was one of the driving forces behind abstraction, inventing a brushless painting style based on the assembly or diversion of composite or manufactured materials. Although his creative approach is similar to the Supports/Surfaces movement, which was formed in the late 1960s by former students of the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. His now classic series D’après… , made with graphite pencil, Indian ink or oil paint since the 1970s, coexists with other more abstract works or made with other techniques, which highlights his incessant inventiveness. Masking, stapling, cutting, collage and assemblage test his desire for rupture and renewal.