Bruno Perramant
The Garden of Delights
28/08/2004 t/m 07/11/2004
The GEM is about to become the first museum ever to hold a one-man exhibition
by French painter Bruno Perramant (b. Brest, 1962). Perramant uses traditional
methods to get to grips with contemporary visual culture – his seductive paintings
feature a blend of figurative and abstract approaches, a ragbag of different
styles, and combinations of found images from television, his own snapshots etc.
and quotations from art history.
Although traditional painting no longer seems central to today’s society and the
mass media have become the main producers of visual images, Perramant still
chooses to use painting to express
his vision of contemporary visual culture. He sees painting as an essential
medium and draws no distinction between film and painting: "Film-maker or
painter – we see the same world, we find ourselves in the same time, in the
same light. If one speaks of strategy", he says, "it is based on the fragmented
perception of the everyday world. Evidently the relationship between painting
and other image-related media is incontestable and yet has barely been analysed
– as if there were production secrets to hide." In his eyes, the concept of ‘reality’
has become meaningless. He suggests that ‘real life’ survives only in the form of
‘loose signs’ and it is these ‘apparition’ of a fragmented reality that he depicts in a
palette of dreamy pastel colours.
Perrament’s challenging, ambivalent paintings bring together different images and
meanings. They are frequently composed of several panels, each featuring
differing motifs and together constituting exercises in observation, association
and interpretation which sometimes extend
over many metres. In his paintings, Perramant constantly plays with meanings,
references, formal analogies and genres. He strings together words and images
garnered from the street, from TV
and cinema, or from art history. In the GEM, for example, he will present
polyptychs combining highly finished landscapes reminiscent of the Hague
School with simplified heavy-impasto images of film credits. Other paintings
feature a doll-like Cat Woman, subtitled TV pictures, icon-like portraits of women,
abstract explosions of colour (fireworks) or embracing couples snapped from
his Montmartre studio and depicted in rock-candy colours. There are also
pictures of models in his studio containing references to Picasso’s Demoiselles
d’Avignon. Despite the visual seductiveness of his work, Perramant’s malicious
mixture of subjects, colours and painting styles keeps his pictures well out
of the comfort zone. The images are never easy to interpret but invariably
ambivalent, constantly leaving room for new associations.
An exhibition catalogue will be published. The exhibition is sponsored by Institut
Francais des Pays-Bas, The Hague.
