Catherine Bernier

Catherine Bernier, Tracing the Universal 

Between figuration and abstraction, Catherine Bernier's "poetic inks" are an ode to our humanity. First of all by the link they weave between the East and the West. Fascinated by Chinese culture from adolescence, she will in fact leave to live in this thousand-year-old country after studying at INALCO where she will receive teaching, in particular from the poet François Cheng. There she traveled the lands of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and many other provinces, studied Taoist philosophy, rubbed shoulders with poets and learned the art of calligraphy. 

But the humanity sung by these inks that she considers as poems is also the one that unites us to nature in what is ephemeral and timeless. Hence the almost omnipresence of circular, curved and spiral forms, expressions of an energy that never ceases to be reborn, carried away by the infinity of the vital flow. Hence also the care with which the artist mixes Gingko Biloba leaves with her abstract forms, through which she represents "the force of resilience of Nature, its capacity to generate masterpieces and its beauty, a metaphor for Art, for the power of creation". 

Within an aesthetic that takes up the duotone of traditional Chinese paintings and on which her signature stands out, a seal drawn in vegetable ink "madder lacquer", Catherine Bernier thus invites us to journeys as much geographical as spiritual where, like the Shanshui of the Yuan dynasty, poetry and painting intertwine. If painter-poets mixed their calligraphic impressions with their vision of a mountain or a watercourse, Catherine Bernier for her part synthesizes these two arts by painting poems that go beyond common and literal language to better reveal the universality of our human condition. 

Between white and black, East and West, Nature and Humanity, abstraction and figuration, tradition and contemporaneity, poetry and painting, ephemerality and immutability, it is therefore a work within which dialogue a multitude of opposites which it gives to see here all the creative complementarity. A completeness that she traces in vegetable ink on handmade papers, as if to better ward off contemporary brutality with a thousand-year-old delicacy. 

Bertrand Naivin