From 26 January to 25 February 2023
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
Some twenty exceptional, previously unseen works by Bernard Saby: the seventh exhibition of his remarkable work at the gallery in fifteen years.
It is always intriguing, when speaking of abstract painting, to imagine the word “intimacy”. After 1945, for obvious reasons, in music as in writing or painting, many tried to imagine new writings of rupture. Bernard Saby embodies this challenge. First a mathematician, then a member of the twelve-tone movement with René Leibowitz and Pierre Boulez, he finally chose painting and sought what a new writing of the sensible might be. In an interview with Michel Butor, master of the Nouveau Roman, he describes very precisely the tension born of the possibility of depth.
Bernard Saby
Well, one day a depth began to appear in my paintings, and I went into it, I threw myself headlong into exploring it
Michel Butor
How did this depth come about?
Bernard Saby
I tried to organise my works through symmetries, then through homologies. That is, I set one form in play with another similar but larger or smaller one. As soon as the eye identified a series of similar forms, increasing or decreasing, they automatically arranged themselves in space.
Michel Butor
So at the origin there is a notion of variation, which may well explain how you moved from music to painting and what essential kinship links your work to that of the most inventive composers of your time.
Bernard Saby
Everything comes from an element, a fundamental figure, a theme that can be defined as two vertical lines of equal length joined by an oblique line, a kind of crank. If you add its mirror image with respect to a horizontal line, you get something like a crankshaft; if you add, at some distance, its mirror image with respect to a vertical axis, you get on one side a kind of bottle, on the other a kind of glass, and if you vary the dimensions of these elements in relation to one another you generate an infinite number of figures.
From a technical point of view, what interested me above all was that here was a very powerful means of binding the different parts of the painting to one another. It forms figures that fit into each other. Right and left are thus linked to one another as if by a series of dovetails.
The eye always tends to straighten this oblique; the figure, especially when grouped with others like it, tends to unfold in space. The oblique will tend towards a horizontal, and one of the two verticals will come forward or move back from the other.
I made walls, crystalline and vitrified caves, which sometimes opened onto a sky. Going deeper, I quite naturally settled into that opening, and so I painted landscapes.
Talks
- Friday 3 February 2023, 6 to 8 pm: presentation and talk with Stéphane Gatti on previously unseen works by Bernard Saby. Where does he come from?
- Friday 17 February 2023, 6 to 8 pm: a further talk with Stéphane Gatti, on the writings of André Berne-Joffroy and Paul Valéry.
“Imagine yourself in a world painted in pure colours. These colours follow one another in measure over bodies, the sky and so on. With sudden entrances of incandescent suns, black nights falling like lightning, etc., capsizings of forms that would behave like rivers. And the changes I speak of carried at musical speed.” Paul Valéry, Chemin d’André Berne-Joffroy pour arriver à Bernard Saby.
Artist: Bernard Saby