Composition, 1985

Bernard Moninot  

Bernard Moninot was born on May 15, 1949 in Le Fay (Saône-et-Loire) France.
He lives and works in Le-Pré-Saint-Gervais and in Chateau-Châlon.
He teaches at the Beaux-Arts in Paris.

His first works can be placed in the context of the New Figuration.

In the early 1970s he starts to show works evoking the urban environment: stores, drugstores, service stations, greenhouses, etc.
He started his artistic career at a young age by his participation in the Paris Biennale in 1971, and then in 1973, where he presented his first ?Vitrines? (Storefronts).

In his works, Bernard Moninot creates a competition between the real and the fictional space of the representation. The storefronts are presented under glass and the idea doubles, on two plans.

In the early 1980s he used the glass as support, by applying on one side of the glass black smoke, various pigments, iron filings, silica or graphite powder for suggesting elements of architecture, the shadows of strange tools used for measurement or fragile metal constructions.

From 1992 on, he produced the series ?Drop Shadows?, very different technically: shapes made of enameled metal projecting their shadows on walls, evoking screens or moucharabieh filtering the sunlight through their complex cut patterns.

He also produced the studiolo, some kind of tool for measuring time and space that, posed on glass shelves that casts its geometric shadows on the walls of the room.