Bernard Dutilleul - Artiste peintre

Painting is a self-sufficient means of expression, a language of its own that replaces the spoken word. To appreciate painting as I understand it, you have to be aware of its grammar.

Drawing comes before writing, it's a medium between thought and the world, a way of appropriating it through creativity.

Painting today, as I see it, has no message. It has nothing other than its plasticity, which is the pathway to feelings. It's a vehicle. I assert the absence of a message, because I want to be free of any exterior, any social or political involvement, to be interested only in the image of painting in the making.

Reality isn't enough, I need to work with this means of expression that comes to me from who knows where, because nothing in my family led me towards these territories. The trigger was probably there, but it escapes me today, a chance encounter no doubt, a box of oil paint offered by a wise person probably.

The more colour I add, the more I work the canvas, the more I descend into an unexplored space that I'm trying to make my own, without daring to understand it, for fear it will disappear.

Abstraction allows for each person's personal interpretation and this intimate degree of communication between the doer, the lover, the disliker and the reactor. The unconscious intrudes...

The more we go within ourselves, the closer we come to the universal.

I would like people to look at my paintings as they would listen to music, as a language that explains nothing other than itself, the resonance of the colours, the timbre, the vibrations, between the message and the evocation, between the head and the heart.

It's important to me to leave painting in its own domain, a kind of artistic vagueness, a level of communication that opens up possible interpretations or variable experiences. Hearing what you want to hear and seeing what you want to see.

When I paint, I breathe it in, as we can do when nature invades us and transports us into something spiritual, something beyond us, where the feeling of being alive fills us.

This approach is a journey. I don't know where I'm going, but it's as the canvas takes shape that I move towards balance, or an assumed imbalance, which is sometimes unfortunate.
In this case, I have to change direction, go back up the slope, turn right, turn left..., but I go forward looking for the hidden meaning of the pictorial events and how they react to each other, how they respond to each other, how they love each other or clash. It's sometimes very hard, sometimes jubilant.

They are pictorial allusions, colourful musical notes, "non-representations" that I would like to be meaningful to everyone, because beyond the discourse....

No analysis, just feeling, like breathing in the wind, feeling the warmth of the sun, smelling the undergrowth, touching a piece of bark, hearing a bird sing. All these things that mean nothing other than that you're alive and that it's magnificent. It's a vital, transcendent moment when I can breathe more easily, when I'm irrigated. A form of meditation.

You have to imagine the blank canvas at the start. As there is no subject, the work begins with an acrylic background that determines movements, spots and a background colour. Sometimes I go to great lengths to use colours I don't really like... like a game with myself.
I move forward, I add, I modify, I lighten, I darken, I turn, I forget the canvas for days, for months, dissatisfied with this provisional result, waiting for the moment when I say stop, this one is finished. The test on the wall confirms the idea. I know at that moment that the balance is there, the coherence and that it's in keeping with my sensibility at the time.

You have to let go, let go of the realm of the comprehensible to move towards the sensory, the emotional. In painting I become an autonomous person, free, detached from reality, protected from the vicissitudes of the world, it's another dimension, a source of creation, capable of contemplation, of fertility, with perhaps a metaphysical dimension, a search for balance and plenitude, an exacerbation of the senses.

Painting is a way of looking at things. To free ourselves from meaning, to be solely in the plastic experience, not in illustration but in the abstract, which is the very principle of creation. Doing something that didn't exist before. The music of poetry is sometimes more beautiful than the words themselves.

The mere summoning of conceptual intelligence is not enough to create emotion. Poetry is the sensitive evocation of a relationship with the world, with oneself, with others, in the secret recesses of the emotions. Creation, which starts from the immaterial perception of human reality, takes shape and becomes one of its solid elements. The back-and-forth between content and form, based on research and intrinsic honesty, is the magic of creation.

"The artist brings to the surface the being of each presence. The finished work is, from then on, like a living being. An experience of evidence and mystery all at once, art transforms the exterior into the interior. Art is the limit of the world, where the word falls silent and opens up to inner vision. The artist's limit is matter: "The artist brings to the surface the being of each presence; the finished work is therefore like a living being. The unity is in the living being that holds everything together, such is the work of art, the work is animated by a spirit. The experience of evidence and mystery at the same time, art transfigures the exterior into the interior. (Jean Brun, Qu'est-ce que la beauté).