Bernard Fièvre

Bernard Fièvre is a French painter.

"Up to a point, trying to express as many things as possible through minimal monochromaticity is to observe our world, and the creation through which we relate to it; from the respectful thoughtful distance that suggests the frailty and transience of the human condition.

To say that, or to make use of femininity —an allegory of our humanity, constantly challenged, never really grasped, to guide one’s work and one’s steps…

My aim as a painter mostly consists in spanning the distance that may exist between the essence of things and my own perception of them. Thanks to representational painting, through a coherent self-sufficient plastic language, I would like my paintings to expose pretense, sometimes with irony. Presenting the masks a woman can wear while most of the time suggesting the person in hiding is to describe one’s humanity metaphorically. These masks are mere traces of the soul: they mirror a confiscated world. One must always give the mind an opportunity to sound the depth of things by trying to see through secretive masks, trying not to fool oneself, dipping into the shadows of the past, giving up the tabula rasa notion, to draw the elements of our development. The root of things constantly has, for me, whatever its guise, the sublimated face of a female figure.

At bottom, this constant desire to turn the sensory object a female body into an object for study, for introspection, is a spiritual quest. But, obviously, for this quest to be meaningful, the sensory object must still be present and identifiable. All considered, art exists only to (re)present visible objects. I stand apart from contemporary trends in this respect. If we develop a theory of representation, contemporary artists are happy with pure concepts while I would like to inspire thought on the sentient beings in our world, with whom one must mark off one’s humanity, however minute the trace of one’s life. Also, to show that the pleasures of the eyes and thoughtfulness can be compatible; that they can even be fully reconciled in what we usually call a work of art" - text by Bernard Fièvre.