Jérôme BOUTTERIN - VITAL.E.S

Press release

Galerie Richard is pleased to present Jérôme BOUTTERIN’s second solo exhibition, entitled VITAL.E.S. About the paintings shown in this exhibition, the artist writes: “…maybe I have the feeling that our bodies are emptying, our heads too, and not only our bodies our landscapes as well so I make paintings against that. It’s true, I wanted to make paintings that represent something of life, of vital energy, hence the title. I have the impression that these paintings self-fabricate, self-generate: a single mark, a clump, a heap of colors is enough, and it grows, it comes to life. They have much to do with the paintings from the BPPB* series, with that colorful agglomeration from which lines emerge, from which a drawing is extracted. And what comes out are often empty outlines rectangle, egg, sphere, triangle like a prehistoric geometry. (This heap must already be a painting, not just a heap, a heap becoming a painting.)
All of this remains within the painting, I mean within the limits of the canvas, with rare exceptions. Why? I don’t much like lying. Pretending that it continues when nothing actually continues is pointless: everything is here and only here, no tricks. Nothing suggested. I made these paintings in a beautiful state of solitude because they demand it. To succeed (in my view), they also require a state in which things no longer matter especially painting.”

BOUTTERIN extends the primordial relationship to painting that we evoked during his previous exhibition, a relationship made of extremely simple gestures within the limits of the canvas, using the white surface as a component in its own right. In the paintings presented here, these notions are distilled to the essential, for they possess the fleetingness and liveliness of the sketch at once unfinished and yet complete. The substance of the painting shifts from thick materiality to an almost total absence of marks, thus giving body, and even a pronounced sensuality, to these pared-down forms.

Everything plays out in the apparent nonchalance of an improbable sequence beginning with the initial thick, colored deposit, and what will emerge from it to collide with or rebound off the edges of the canvas. Far from escaping or denying the canvas, Boutterin reaffirms it as a surface of infinite play, as a rule or framework to be circumvented. In this deliberate clarity lies a large part of the work, which challenges the surface through a chain of events and suspended situations.

“…Rock/paper/scissors are patches of color, paint decoys, painting of little, few lines, chance lines, happy chance, return to the beginning, hitting the edge, edging the infinite…”

Jérôme BOUTTERIN lives and works in Paris. His training is diverse: after studying art in Nice at the Villa Arson, he became a landscape architect, graduating from the École du Paysage de Versailles, before devoting himself to painting in the 1990s. He teaches at the École d’Architecture de Versailles. The artist exhibited at Art Paris in 2023 in a solo show with Galerie Marc Minjauw; in China following an invitation from the Institut Français and curator J. Zhen Chen; and at the Kerguéhennec Contemporary Art Center at the invitation of Olivier Delavallade. His works were recently shown in group exhibitions such as Paint, Painting, Painter at the SHED in Rouen, at the Meymac Contemporary Art Center, and at the MAC-VAL in Vitry as part of the exhibition Cherchez le garçon.

*A lot of little, little of a lot