BRUNO MOINARD
DANS UN SOUFFLE
Bruno Moinard paints in one breath. His painting is movement. His new works are no exception. On his canvases, matter, shapes, and lines swell, twist, coil. Light slips into them. It strikes or caresses, insinuates itself, almost palpable.
He paints the way Paul Morand wrote. He drives, in the open air, the same racing cars as The Man in a Hurry: his cars are never far from his studio, nor from a cliff whose limestone, eroded by the wind, inspires him, crumbling into a greige shore at its base.
Bruno Moinard paints in one breath—quickly, in large format, with energy. Things move. There are clouds, there is wind. Fresh Normandy wind, a warm draft from a doorway left ajar, a light ripple on a surface. The color of wind, the color of wind-swept earth. The color of the English Channel—blue-grey—, the color of a restless bocage, the color of lead before a storm. Deep nights, black or blue, shifting, pierced by a glow or a burst of light.
Are we outside, are we inside? Is someone in the frame, or is it only an illusion? Who is that elegant figure? Fine, pale lines sometimes scratch the dense expanses. They create tension, adding a story to the story.
Painter, then, but also architect of some of the most beautiful interiors, designer, scenographer: Bruno Moinard always begins with a gesture. That quick, primal gesture that— in one breath—projects what inspires him. How he sees things.
Thus, his travel sketches, displayed in an alcove, capture on the fly the perpetual movement of cities in constant eruption, of crowds, of the landscapes he crosses. The artist-traveler, summoned by a thousand projects around the world, seized by the urge to grasp everything, gathers himself each day before his notebooks to throw onto the page, in felt-tip lines, the scenes and landscapes he has seen: the calm of a small house in a Japanese garden, or the vibrating frenzy of neon lights in a metropolis. People, things, the spirit that animates them.
It is the same breath, the same energy, the same gentle urgency: to convey, before it evaporates, the emotion that keeps one alive.
