The Spirit of Painting: The ‘Painting with Cinema’
The text read by Bernard is originally a series of interviews. One with Ann Michalson, an American art critic specializing in experimental cinema and contemporary art. This art historian wrote a book about his work: ‘Cine Painting’ at ‘October edition book’, which was republished in 2021, in French, at ‘I Gallery edition’ under the title of ‘Painting with Cinema by Bernard Gast’. The other interview was with canadian critic Don McCallum.
Bernard Gast’s regular tributes to different artists and aesthetic trends suggest that “Painting with Cinema” is a way of “Painting with History” (including the history of Cinema through its use of films from all times). This first figurative series of 29 ‘Paintings with Cinema’ reveals its broad philosophical reflection, from poetry to politics and of course pictorial aesthetics.
To Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Chaïm Soutine (‘Skinned beef’), Expressionism and the New Figuration (My father was a butcher). To the social realism of Gustave Courbet (Jousts in deep water ). Op art figurative, the Photographic Avant-garde of El Lissitzky and Umbo, Orientalism, Subjective Cinema of the Avant-gardes, William Hogarth, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Metaphysical Painting of Chirico, Alighiero Boetti and Alfred Hitchcock ( I built, Cure them, Who are you?, The Parable of the Blind 1, Belgian business and The future’s seeds).
With Picture on the radio, Love caresses his cheek, In the night, I see..., I drink the twilight out of your giant moon.
With Mirror, The sumptuous beds, Venus
With Alain Fournier and Beckett (Game over, Romanticism 4)
On determinism (Why don’t you look by yourself?); psychoanalysis (The portrait of Sigmund Freud, without beard); humour (Theo’s fishes, The artist); spirituality (The first night, The spirit of the child, M’aime, Tell me the Heaven).
With the aesthetic question about Painting (Paintless Painting) that Bernard has been thinking about since the 1990s, according to new concepts of 'Paintless Painting', ‘To paint with Cinema’, etc. Finally, politics is invited, and its famous ‘All this, it’s Cinema' is fully expressed in works such as Jousts in deep water, To live together, Let everything go, Belgian business, What else to tell you? , The future’s seeds, etc.)
We wish you a good... Contemplative reflection!
Texts : Ann Michalson, Don McCallum & Bernard Gast (interviews)
Poems : Bernard Gast
Translation : Raphaël Loison