Cyrille Borgnet

Cyrille Borgnet offers a very special use of concrete.

His work is developed around the treatment of materials that can be described as industrial, urban (concrete, bitumen). He uses them on a traditional support (linen canvas on a frame) and in so-called "natural" compositions (landscapes). He plays with these apparent oppositions to mix material and transparency, roughness and sophistication. In its very large formats, concrete (or cement) is neither brushed nor smoothed, but mixed with colored natural pigments, rust, graphite.

Abstract landscapes, made of horizon lines or blurred spaces. Urban landscapes, attempts to restore to us all the brutal poetry that the abandoned city walls, left to decay, can evoke.

The aquatic landscapes are a series resulting from the detailed observation of the Water Lilies by Claude Monet (in its final version of 1917). Its waters are transparent and iridescent with graphite, the gold leaf at the heart of the concrete. The land landscapes, of powdery rust, matte and sensitive, make the horizon float under a sky of cold and brilliant cement.

And in these latest creations, urban landscapes, made of energy and thick matter, he lets the light of a rusty sun explode and reveals vegetation nourished with hydrochloric acid. All his works, carried by concrete, its strength, its relief, its resistance suggest the fault, the accident, the crack that open the gaze and carry the imagination.

Cyrille Borgnet was born in 1966, after having followed the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, he settled in the Paris region. He lives and works in Bordeaux today.