Tree / Raoul Dufy
In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice decided to dynamically bring the fine arts closer to everyday life and to invite contemporary art in particular to revisit the works in its collection.
As part of the program "Contemporary views on the collection" and during the Heritage Days, she deals with the theme of nature and the tree, revealing the modernity of the work of Raoul Dufy and of his time.
Tree / Raoul Dufy
Contemporary views on the collection, “Tree / Raoul Dufy” tour, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice - September 19 to 20, 2009.
On the occasion of Heritage Days, Véronique Bigo completes four seasons of work around the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts through her original approach to Raoul Dufy’s works, of which the museum has a large collection. She ends her journey by bringing us back to the object borrowed from the landscape, sharing her vision of nature and color with Raoul Dufy.
The interrogative form
Uncanny, disturbing, Véronique Bigo's large paintings of roots bring us into a universe where nature, far from being the relaxation of urban man, reveals, as in David Caspar Friedrich's work, the torments of life. . […]
These images of roots shown outside the ground, as we can see in Viet Nam, Mauritius or Costa Rica, raise the recurring question about the power of forms upon our imagination.
The worry about softness
Véronique Bigo's roots surprise us with the strangeness of their stems, with uncertain and anemic development and which we imagine nourished by a too hot monsoon. The growth seems to have given way here to lazy growths. Hanging like clusters of pieces of intestines, frozen by a sun that should never have warmed them, they disturb us with their softness. […]
Her crude representation of the soft form, almost shapeless by its strangeness, gives off a violence that strikes directly at our most primitive sensitive references. Softness which is not sweetness, disturbs our perception of the sensitive, especially when the artist stages the improbability of the real.
The opening through color
This force emerges in the lines of colors, green, blue or black which overflow the work to merge with the picture rails that she has designed herself to carry her paintings. Placed in front of windows, they reduce the surrounding nature to a single chromatic vibration that she disturbs with graffiti, signs of the inscription of her emotions in the environment. Like Raoul Dufy, she thus dissociates drawing and color. But while for him the color goes beyond the line of the drawing to try to capture the movement, she separates them completely to leave each spectator the possibility of granting them his own sensitive vibration. […]
Brice d'Antras art and design critic, Paris, 2008
Texts taken from the flyer "Contemporary views on the collection September 19-20, 2009", Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice.
Photo credit: JC LETT