Terre - Gold, 2019

Bernard Quentin  

Starting in 1945, Bernard Quentin established a unique connection between writing and visual art and his work is an illustration of this connection.

Dali recognized his originality and described him as a pioneer of cybernetic art and electronic writing. Monumental automatic inscriptions of architectural proportions inspire his practice. All forms of writing can be found in his work: hieroglyphs, pictograms, inscriptions, and graffiti.

Everything that is connected to writing interests and attracts him, and his totem-writings witness the accomplishments of his original practice.

He is also famous, starting in the '60s, when he takes distance from painting, for his environmental interventions and the inflatable structures he produces in cities like New York or Paris. His artworks are situated along the roads or float in the air. He is a landscape architect, a designer and he deciphers the codes of his time and of the cultural environment in which he lives.

Bernard Quentin was a part of the movement against art as a commodity and dedicated his practice to the environment for a while. In 1976, he went back to monumental scriptura1 and the “street poems" and “pbject poems" take an essential place in his practice. In 1977 he produced, with a dozen of artists like Soto, Restany or Messagier, the '1'Art' project. In March 2007, the Musée de la Poste dedicated him a retrospective, an exhibition that retraced his whole artistic career.