In the light of Vincent Bioulès

Born in Montpellier in 1938, where he lives and works, the painter Vincent Bioulès is one of the founding members of the Supports/Surfaces group, this artistic movement which opened the field of so-called contemporary art, both in painting and in sculpture, at the beginning of the 1970s. Alongside him we will therefore regularly find Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, André-PierreArnal, Toni Grand, Bernard Pagès, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi and Claude Viallat. More or less all from the Montpellier School of Fine Arts and the Paris National School of Fine Arts.

But Vincent Bioulès definitely cannot be reduced to the ephemeral adventure of the last French avant-garde, he whose paintings also look towards Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard or Henri Matisse. Marie Maertens, journalist for the magazine Connaissance des arts, went to meet him in his studio in Montpellier while he was in full preparation for the exhibition currently devoted to him at the Parisian art gallery La Forest Divonne, “Vincent Bioulès. My places of memory”, visible until February 25. The artist has in fact specially created a set of new works of art, after his two previous exhibitions presented by the same art gallery, “The twelve months of the year” in Paris in 2020, and “Jardin (s)” in Brussels in 2021. La Forest Divonne also exhibited Vincent Bioulès’ artworks for sale at the ExpoChicago fair in spring 2022, where they were a huge success. And the artist's fame was confirmed the same year by the acquisition of one of his major works from 1983, The Mysterious Barricades, by the Center Pompidou.

In this new series, the man who defines himself as "the only Sunday painter to really work every day" continues to explore with the tip of his brush the gardens and places of his childhood, of which he creates paintings teeming with greenery and colors, in the expression of a generous and fanciful nature. “The paintings in question today refer to founding elements of my sensitivity: views of privileged gardens in Nîmes and Montpellier, which determined my view of the world,” explains Vincent Bioulès. “The three views of my parents' garden with their pink skies refer to the fourth Sunday of Lent, known as laetare Sunday, where the officiants wear pink ornaments. The landscapes of Nîmes are inspired by my mother's watercolors which determine their roots in my early childhood... As for the flower paintings, they want to evoke my dazzlement in the face of nature, deeply linked to my childhood sensitivity found. »

Obviously, what Vincent Bioulès wants to convey, and what determines his painting, is his inner emotion. But light has always been one of his underlying subjects, from the non-figurative period of Supports/Surfaces to the countless landscapes of the South that he never tires of representing. Between the light of the books he devours, that of the South and that which floods the single room where he works, the erudite painter with precise and delicate phrasing never ceases to be enlightened, whatever the genre he chooses. chooses to treat. “The artist also claims total freedom of production and assumes clear breaks in style, which may have disconcerted the art world,” specifies Marie Maertens in the December issue of Connaissance des arts where the article that she dedicated to her workshop visit.

In Vincent Bioulès' workshop, the oil tubes are stored in boxes, the books in bookcases, the brushes are lined up and various palettes offer these very Mediterranean colors that he loves so much, predominantly blues , greens and ochres. He himself is rather the tidy type. We learn in this article that he reads essays every morning while drinking his coffee, that he goes to his studio around 10 a.m., then returns to have lunch with his wife, before returning to paint until 6 p.m. , at which time he goes to buy a copy of the newspaper Le Monde to go read it on the terrace of a café. He, who once traveled a lot, now chooses stationary journeys, while continuing to explore the Saint-Loup peak or the banks of the Etang de l'Or. His memories are now his main source of inspiration, even if he still draws or paints on the motif. And the photographs he takes on site only serve to correct certain details of his paintings for sale.

If he invented the name of the Supports/Surfaces group founded in 1969, referring on one side to the frame as a support for the canvas, and on the other side to the canvas itself, Vincent Bioulès is very quickly emancipated. The rigor imposed by this movement was definitely not for him. Working alongside and admiring the thoughts of the painter Michel Parmentier (1938-2000), co-founder of the BMPT group with Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Niele Toroni, the Montpellier painter found himself captivated in 1966 by the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale . “Two completely opposite paintings responded to my contradictions,” he tells the journalist from Connaissance des arts. “When Helen Frankenthaler revealed her immense lyricism through her liquid spaces very close to gigantic watercolors, like abstract skies, Ellsworth Kelly showed, conversely, very rigorous paintings, made up of large flat colored areas. This influenced me a lot, especially during my first exhibition within the ABC Productions group, which preceded Supports/Surfaces. »

At the same time, his friend Jean Hugo (1894-1984), also a painter but also a French illustrator and writer, made him understand during one of the dinners bringing them together every Monday, that deep down he cultivated a taste for a “nominalist” aesthetic inducing that appellations are language conventions. This wonderfully answers the question that Vincent Bioulès asked himself regarding the instinctive attraction that he continues to feel for primitive Italian painting. As Marie Maertens recalls, regarding the Supports/Surfaces period, “during these few years of canvases with spaces delimited by more or less radical lines and bands, the artist admits that he always continued to draw sketches on the motif, in his little notebooks, and to create landscapes when he went away in the summer vacation.”