Christophe AVELLA-BAGUR - Les Pleureuses

Press release

The new corpus of Christophe Avella Bagur is unique. The sub-series of Face Floating Soul, inaugurated in 2004, is completed today by Les pleureuses. This series of works is worked on paper with Indian ink exclusively. For the second time in three years, with Face FS Black and White Chaos and Les pleureuses, the artist leaves oil painting on canvas to work on a simple medium, obliging «a single stroke of brush» where the usual stratification of oil paint becomes transparencies and tonal work of black, carried out with a saving of means and signs.

We are in a time, or the good will of the use of a technique, of a material by the artist, must no longer be the result of a taste, a discovery, a novelty to punctuate the work, but must be programmatic, economic, political. Art and culture are a commitment to society, in a time and space. To produce pieces in an artistic continuum without the concern of the world is not to commit to tomorrow.Creating works must also and now respond to an earthly morality paying attention to the impact of an activity, waste.

I see a lot of artists producing a lot of works a year, without taking into account their impact. I say to myself, is it really responsible to think that we are detaching ourselves from environmental concerns and from the imperative we have to limit, if there is still time, the ecological catastrophe to come? If the artist, this consciousness among men, does not care, he is then only a hypocrite without awareness of this crazy superproduction. I don’t want to be a part of it, because I have to stop painting, I have to stop creating works if necessary. We have to create less and better. Is the production of works in quantity legitimate? Must we satisfy the insatiability of the distorted urban spectator? These issues are never raised by artists, it is a problem. Artistic production gives the impression of an overbidding without soul and conscience.”

With Les pleureuses, we trace the history of art for a short time with the painter Van Der Weyden, when this artist painted a Marie-Madeleine crying in the scene of the pieta of the Prado museum. The work started there, in 2014, during the New Apostles series with two oil-painted portraits of a crying woman. Today the sub-series Les pleureuses presents contemporary women who have to feed their families, having a dream, struggling, changing their lives, being witnesses of the world. They do not cry especially, they might have reasons to do so, but only the water medium of Indian ink cries for them on bursts of large format.

Adrian Speck, septembre 2020