Bernard Aubertin nailed in the red

About the exhibition Bertrand Aubertin - À feu et à sang
at the Bonisson Art Center in Rognes - Until 3/02/2022

Making art seems to have been quite easy in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades out of time during which the most important works of modernity were created. There was such a dogma of the new that the criterion of novelty relegated to the background any dimension other than the immediately perceptible. Depth, for example. Did the artists of the time think? Or was it enough to have found a gimmick like Warhol or a good yarn like Lichtenstein to break through, exist and last, as the Beatles did in music in the radio desert of the time? This is the question that arises when reading the article that the magazine Beaux-Arts devotes to Bernard Aubertin.

In those blessed times when a strong idea was enough, Bernard Aubertin was, like many painters, in the midst of a tug-of-war between figurative and abstract temptations. One only has to look at the very Van Goghian youthful works of a Mondrian to be convinced that many of the leading artists of modern art have in fact played for a long time between mimesis and jumping into the void. The most radical were of course those who rejected any desire to create a motif and concentrated on the naked creative gesture here and pure colour there. And then one day Bernard Aubertin visited Yves Klein's studio.

Everyone knows that Klein stole the most beautiful blue in the world from the rainbow. He even registered it as an industrial patent under the name YKB (International Klein Blue)! And just as blue belongs to Klein, black has become, over time, the property and even the preserve of Pierre Soulages. He has explored it so much that he has clearly shown us how much this colour, although the dullest of all, conceals unsuspected nuances and inner tones. Klein's blue is therefore unique. Soulages' black is plural. And how does Aubertin situate himself in the painting?

He has taken the red! Why did he do it? Because he liked red on a purely plastic level. Because red was free. And because he must have thought that if a painter who limited his palette to blue was recognised as an artist, all he had to do was to do as he did, but a little differently, in order to achieve this status. In short, one does Klein but differently and above all with another colour. Augustin thus embarked on monochromy with all the advantage of not having to propose a symbol. Between blood and fire, red speaks for itself of passion and danger. The meaning is obvious, but in practice it is deactivated. Does Aubertin have nothing new to say, or at least nothing different? Is he making art or just being an artist?

It is clear that our man has been searching. Failing to explore the mythologies and grey areas of his time, Bernard Aubertin has explored all the technical possibilities offered to a brush to deposit red on a support. Whether it is a canvas or a nail board. And Stéphanie Pioda of Beaux-Arts invites us to follow this ant's path which "combines both space and time, movement and energy to bring it to a more universal dimension". Let's admit it. Purity leads to seeing what is most intimately opposed to the void. That's for sure. But where there is a scent of fraud in this story is that this type of discourse implies that this nudity has the prerogative of depth, which would give it a de facto tacit superiority on the moral level.

This is where things go wrong. It is one thing that Aubertin's work is nothing more than a creative design of the colour red. But that does not give him title to the philosophical and metaphysical nothing. It is from this intellectual posture that a critical imbecility is born, of which Beaux-Arts is an accomplice here. The emptiness of an artistic work is not a sign of quality that invites us to reflect on the emptiness of the world in the face of the artist's silent and therefore mysterious inner fullness. There is a difference between engaging in abstract reflection and abstraction.

Illustration : Bernard Aubertin - Tableau clous 1969