‘INFINITIFS’ (INFINITIVES)
Neither personal nor temporal, an infinitive is a clause that doesn’t have to be conjugated.
Whether conveying a state of being, a feeling, a yearning, an emotion or an action, an infinitive verb is in suspense: it is nothing but its sheer meaning.
An infinitive is thus a temptation for the artist, who will try and enclose it in his canvas, extract it from the living world and project it onto a medium to capture it, either with gentleness or power.
For instance, grasping what to plant, to disappear, to stir, to stammer out, to hum, to keep an eye on intrinsically mean and representing it is an attractive exercise.
And yet, how can one stand against the morning light, which is different from the evening light, against moods that change from one hour to the next, how can one not get personally involved in one’s creation? How can one not give a personal interpretation?
There is indeed always someone in a painting and a moment it refers to, somewhere: it is the artist at the very time and place he paints. The infinitive form in painting is therefore a dream, a utopia.
Bruno Moinard is an artist as well as a designer and architect, an expert in volumes and light, materials, sensitive shapes and transparencies. He was bound to be drawn to the exercise but also compelled to share the purity of the infinitive with his obsession for setting an atmosphere, creating a mood, and imposing a décor.
The twenty-six works of art brought together, including two diptychs, and the body of work they form are as a counterpoint to those that Bruno combines, at the Bruno Moinard Éditions gallery, with the furniture he designs.
A spiritual approach
‘When I designed the cellars of famous vineyards, I sometimes believed that I was building cathedrals. Staying in spiritual places of contemplation such as great French abbeys restored my sense of proportion’
In a cabinet of curiosities, Bruno Moinard has gathered together 47 gouaches he painted when on retreats at the abbeys of Cîteaux and Sénanque – a profusion of playful, subtle and spiritual fragments of inner life, seized by Bruno’s eye and emotion in the utter timelessness of the monastic rule.
Exhibition by appointment only.
