Click here to see the paintings on display

BERNARD ORANGE IN CAEN

Bernard Orange, who lives and works in Cherbourg, is one of those painters who deserve special attention. One of a kind, this self-taught painter, who is inspired by and steeped in black humour, has been able to develop a writing that distinguishes him from a certain number of his contemporaries. Having opted for ink and acrylic on canvas after having tried and tested his technique on paper, he has brought to life a universe like no other. His graphic and narrative style, that some liken to the spirit of a comic, allows him to express his dreams and anger, and not without a certain causticity at times. But it is this humour that so often saves us from despair that surfaces in the majority of his paintings where the tree, powerfully charged with symbols, is a recurrent motif. The no less allegorical figure of the bird is equally present. They both deal with the arrogant stupidity of man, this predator whose extreme shortsightedness creates more problems than it solves. The damage he causes to the Earth and his devastating exploitation of the planet's resources are two of the artist's favourite and chief themes. This staunch ecologist's past profession points to an excellent knowledge of the problems linked to the energy that provides us with, we keep telling ourselves, the independence of which we are so fiercely proud. But at what price?

A follower of Prévert, who he had the chance to meet, Orange has a talent for titles and wordplay, not hesitating to, on occasion, place a poem next to one of his works:

Dans les cieux il y a
Des grands oiseaux
Qui volent haut
Très haut
Très haut et très simplement


Sur la terre il y a
Des petits messieurs

Qui volent bas
Très bas et très lourdement

In the skies there are
Big birds
That fly high
Very high
Very high and very simply


On the earth there are
Little men

Who fly low
Very low and very heavily

These flavour-full lines set the tone for the exhibition. On the walls of the Gallery Art-Culture-France in Caen, no less than 43 perfectly displayed pieces draw the visitor into this grotesque yet poetic world. It takes time for a tree to grow, but it only takes a few seconds to cut it down with a chainsaw. This is progress, apparently. And we like to believe that a sudden burst of wisdom will perhaps come from this painting before the Homo sapiens has totally contaminated and destroyed his surroundings.

Luis PORQUET – Les Affiches de Normandie

In relation to Bernard Orange's exhibition at the Gallery Art-Culture-France, I find myself once again astounded standing before his paintings. One may criticize me for always saying the same thing, but it's not my fault if today a good number of artists display a creative audacity that was previously thought to be reserved for abstraction or Impressionism.
First of all, Bernard Orange is an excellent drawer and a superb and subtle colourist. This would have undoubtedly been sufficient talent on its own. And yet his intelligence took things in hand, leading him to unceasingly turn a given situation on its head, and masterfully guiding him towards a realism that stimulates the unreal of our thoughts. With their lively and very precise brush-strokes, each of Bernard Orange's paintings represents either a serene or cruel story that is shaped by a nature transcended by poetry. Mysterious cavorting characters hurry towards the unknown in the beautiful chromatic fluidity and daring interlace of the composition.
This is how nature, seasons, bestiary, machines and beings defy logic in such works as "des lendemains de fêtes" (The morning after the night before), which captures all that the situation entails, including the worrying, tragic or unusual aftertastes, in a dreamlike reality that nevertheless reveals numerous fine and appealing surprises.

André RUELLAN, art critic

Arborescent work

Here is a rare painter inhabited by a universe that no-one can visualize entirely in just one look. It is a world in perpetual expansion that embraces the complexity of even the field of humanity, and of all that is alive, I'd venture to say. In short, he lives in a space of reflection where derision rivals the most dense and baroque poetry.
In the beginning was the point. It is through this that Orange forged his original style day by day. He had the revelation in 1978, practicing on an anatomical chart. He drew a heart. By multiplying the arteries, veins and veinlets stemming from it, he gradually gave it the appearance of a baobab tree. At the time, the painter limited his use of colours to black and white. This experiment lasted a few years. It was not until much later that colour made an appearance, setting alight the atmosphere of his paintings little by little. In 1981, his decision to start drawing portraits confirmed the intuition of the painter. Using very fine points, he realized very quickly that multiple characters arose from the initial subject, a little like Dali's "Family of Marsupial Centaurs". Fascinated by the inexplicable, Bernard Orange gradually found the base and backbone of its future work, his "mental structure" as he called it.
The tree is (and remains) a support that allows a total and quite exhilarating delirium. He has explored this tree, now emblematic for him, unto sectioning it, leaving visible in the concentric circles of the wood a crowd of ghostly figures that are somewhat disquieting, as the relentless division of a parent cell can be. The idea of proliferation is inherent to the work of Bernard Orange, who can occasionally seem caustic and who constantly questions the very meaning of existence, the insolvable mystery that is time which often reduces us to no more than small blades of grass. Why is there something rather than nothing?
His universe denounces the rampant absurdity of the modern world, where man is crushed by his own inventions, where mutant birds seem like creatures right out of prehistoric caves, and where time itself is like an almost frightening presence. From inside the very canvas, a reassuring light makes a breach appear in the landscape, a positive outcome may be? In this ongoing exercise, to use the painter's own words, Orange somewhat enters a position of meditation, a state of critical analysis.
But let us not be surprised by this fanciful sphere of overlapping components, with its ductile bodies and exacerbated eroticism, because this protruding arborescent world is actually ours. Whether dreamlike or threatening, it is nothing but the reflection of the images that pass through our minds at the speed of thought. There are, thank God, some breaches through which our freedom can fortunately play unhindered.

Luis PORQUET, writer - art critic

VISIT BERNARD ORANGE'S WEBSITE