Bernard Rancillac

The work

La Roue de la Connaissance
(The Wheel of Knowledge)
1985
195 x 130 cm
Acrylic on plywood, bicycle wheel, and objects

The work confronts, not without irony, Eastern spirituality with the fashion that turned it into an object of Western consumption in the 1970s.
The artist depicts a technically very simple image of Buddha, a drawing inspired by a photograph or magazine illustration. With a radical chromatic economy, using few flat colors, the only sense of depth comes from a few objects from a tourist souvenir shop (two small cheap ceramic Buddhist images and a gold-plated brass pendant) which, significantly, seem to have been placed there from the viewer’s perspective.
In the center of Buddha’s face is a bicycle wheel, evoking the wheel of Dharma, of change or transformation. It is a Buddhist symbol that points the way up and down to enlightenment and knowledge. The wheel shows how the order of things works naturally without the intervention of external forces.
Furthermore, we must not forget that Bicycle Wheel was one of the most radical works Marcel Duchamp produced in 1913. A wheel, inserted vertically into a small wooden stool, can spin freely but uselessly as it does not move forward, also rendering the stool useless.

The artist

(Paris, 1931–Malakoff, Île-de-France, 2021)

Bernard Rancillac was one of the main organizers, along with the critic Gassiot-Talabot, of the 1964 exhibition Everyday Mythologies at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The exhibition established Narrative Figuration as an alternative to American pop art through an acid critique of the political, economic, and social life of the 1960s and 1970s. An unpredictable and changeable artist, his painting underwent planned variations that disoriented his followers, whether they were gallery owners or collectors. This practice of contradicting himself was intended to prevent him from being pigeonholed as an artist with a single definition.
He always challenged established tastes, whether with series of characters taken from well-known cartoons, such as The Return of Mickey, confronting them with scenes of political and social protest typical of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Algerian War.
Increasingly involved with the French radical left of the time, he committed himself, along with other artists, to initiatives such as the Popular Workshop of the Paris School of Fine Arts during the May 1968 revolution.
From the late 1970s and 1980s onwards, his work moved away from political positioning, while continuing to confront the viewer in an impertinent manner with the new myths created by the media.