Marcel Bouqueton

Marcel Bouqueton , (1921 - 2006), is a painter French of the News École of Paris whose work initially nonfigurative develops as from 1965 in the direction of an allusive evocation.

Biography

Marcel Bouqueton is born on September 18th, 1921 with Constantine (Algérie) but passes all his childhood to Souk-Ahras. The origins of its family are Parisian and auvergnates. His/her large father, engineer, carried out stoppings in Africa, his father, architect, came to Algeria to build tunnels for the railroads and were established there. Marcel Bouqueton very early expresses a taste for the drawing while he attends, just like Marcel Fiorini, the college of Bône, (Annaba). Far from discouraging it, his/her father wishes however that it be able to become teaching and incites it to follow lessons of painting during which it will copy traditional works. From 1938 to 1942 Bouqueton continues, with Marcel Fiorini, his studies at the School of the Art schools of Algiers: it meets soon Louis Nallard and Maria Manton. In 1940 Bouqueton presents with Nallard a first exposure to Algiers and division in 1942 with Marcel Fiorini (engraver) a first purse of the Art schools.

After three years of war of which two in England, in the radio operator service of aviation, Marcel Bouqueton finds into 1945 the Art schools of Algiers, divides in 1946 with Nallard two new purses, exposes with Maria Manton and in the manifestations of the " Friends of the art" what animates Gaston Diehl. In 1946 it goes to Paris to discover the museums there, registered there in the Art schools, crosses the following year Nallard, Maria Manton and Marcel Fiorini come together to settle in France then returns to Algeria, with Birkhadem, not far from Algiers, where it paints solitairement. Edmond Charlot, first editor of Albert Camus twelve years earlier, present in 1948 its paintings and the poet Jean Sénac regularly associates them with the demonstrations which it organizes, with the " Number of or" in 1949, around the review " Soleil" in 1950, then " Group 51". It is as from this time that Bouqueton will discover, of the Kabylie and the Aurès until Tébessa, the variety of the Algerian landscape. In 1953 Bouqueton exposes to Algiers, with the Gallery " Rivages" of Edmond Charlot and, at the sides in particular of Baya, Jean de Maisonseul, Maria Manton and Nallard, under the sign of the review " Terrasses" that Sénac founded, like with Oran, once again with Nallard, with the gallery of avant-garde " Colline" what directs Robert Martin.

At this point in time Bouqueton decides definitively to leave Algeria, one year before the release of the war of independence. Installed initially in the Parisian suburbs, with Saint-Germain-in-Bush hammer, it finds his companions of Algiers and becomes acquainted with Roger Chastel with which it binds friendship. In 1956 it exposes for the first time to the Salon of New Realities, receives the Price of the Foundation Felix Fénéon, becomes acquainted with Roger Bissière, meets the critic Roger Van Gindertael, which will be shown constantly attentive with its work. It takes part last once in Algiers, in 1957, with a collective exposure presented by Edmond Charlot. At the beginning of the Années 1960 it finds in summer the glare of the Mediterranean light with Peniscola, village of the Spanish coast which Nallard, Maria Manton and Jean Sénac attend similarly. Bouqueton is essential “like one of the most sensitive landscape designers and rightest of tone”, notes in " Cimaise" Georges Boudaille in 1961 at the time of the second particular exposure of the painter in Paris, presented to the gallery Pierre Domec.

Thereafter Bouqueton works regularly in the neighborhoods of Fayence in the Var, where it carries out in 1967 the Book first stones , series of broad prints, collected with the colors the oil on paper, of rocks of the area. Exposing regularly in France and to the Netherlands, Bouqueton is of 1969 to 1986 teacher with the Teaching Unit of Architecture n° 8 of Paris. Its most recent exposure was organized to Paris by the Demange gallery in 2005.

Marcel Bouqueton died in Fayence on August 11th, 2006.

Work

“Its two great landscapes solid, are built, generous and its portraits announce an intelligent plastics technician”, note in 1940 Max-pol. Fouchet in " The Echo of Alger" during the first exposure of Bouqueton. The constancy of a concern of construction and color, without concession for the Orientalism, appears in the fabrics which it paints in the following years. “Marcel Bouqueton, very requested by the pure color, painted dead Natural as bright as simplified, increasingly released landscapes of the reason, with the ranges of greens, blue and orange very characteristic, naked modelled nuances of the prism. Its last landscapes where it proves more indifferent to the local tone, more enthusiast of the object signs, tend to a kind of coloured fairyhood”, observes in 1946 Jean Lusinchi. Composed in broad flat tints which release the forms, these paintings testify to a quick change of its work. Bouqueton forms part of these " then; Turcs" young people; , as will call later them the poet Jean Sénac, which hustles the academism of the " School of Alger" , remained largely in margin of the changes which have occurred in painting since the beginning of the century. “With Marcel Bouqueton we enter the unlimited fields of surreal, born from a simple subject”, writes Sénac in 1946 thus. “Its tables emphasize the line precise and clear, the hot color, volumes and let us tons them purified”: “accustomed with the douceâtries, goods (?) spirits could not admit the audacity of these too single circuit lines, of these too violent colors”, adds it the following year ironically, making many times allusion to the work of Bouqueton in the articles which it multiplies at that time (Jean Sénac, Visages of Algeria. Glances on art , 2002, pp. 155,16 and 20).

On the dash of the fabrics which it paints in 1951, such the Plowman or the Sowers whose silhouettes are recomposed according to the filter of the autonomous coherence of the forms and the colors, Bouqueton is diverted as of 1952 of any figuration, “by the means of the very purified human representation”, will specify it. It enters thus to the whole beginning of the Années 1950 the current of the new School of Paris. In a second phase of its route it engages then in the recognition of the capacity which holds painting to build of the new visions, delivered sensory intuitions of immediate space. Its step can only carry out it, complementarily, to exceed the rigidity of any decorative geometry. In 1952 the angular extents that its fabrics imbricate find softened by the feature, false medians or mediating, which accompanies them, underlines their borders, while modelled color animate their internal fields. On the 1953 these surfaces approach, gather and is erased the graphics which articulated them. Bouqueton, in these years, does not entitle any more its broad tabular Compositions only according to their only coloured ranges. Grounds and ochers, golds and bronzes, gray moderated, red and blue scattered, the essence of its pallet is set up at it. Around 1955 the land registers are erased which underlay the balance of its constructions, the colors passing from now on dynamically the ones in the others.

In a third stage, this parcelling out of the forms starts to make show through quasi-landscapes, born only painting. Not more than the preceding ones these fabrics do not derive from preliminary experiments of the world but indistinctly reconstitute of it as in a virtual point the horizon, recreate beyond any anecdotic appearance the feeling of its presence. “The means of painting are enough for him to materialize this “equivalent nature” which is never a figuration nor an interpretation of reality, but results from a deep coincidence between the data of reality and the effects active of painting”, written in 1961 Roger Van Gindertaël. “The naturalists sources of the fabrics of Marcel Bouqueton, deeply interiorized, level in harmony of tons finely moderate which nevertheless some strong accents stress which support the movements of an impregnated consistent paste of light”, it summarizes a few years later, specifying in connection with Bouqueton, like Maria Manton, Nallard and Fiorini, which, natives of Algeria “this origin is certainly not foreign with the fact that their attachment with land reality maintained the presence of this reality in their works, through the abstract step that they adopted”. The tables of Bouqueton are the “memories of exaltés Algerian landscapes”, writes Michel Ragon similarly. Without one being able precisely to speak about a School of the painters of Algeria, it appears indeed that, by their deaf ranges and their sudden flashovers, Bouqueton and his/her friends with the nonfigurative Peinture visions distinct from those of the " open; Young painters of French tradition " Years 1940, of ten years their elder, formed rather, of Moal with Manessier, Jean Bazaine or Gustave Singier, in the transparency of the lights of North.

“After a score of years of experimentation in thefigurative one, my current research aims at recreating, always with a base of abstraction, an identifiable space where are suggested natural died, landscapes and characters”, said Bouqueton ( École of Paris, 1945-1975 , Maison of UNESCO, Paris, 1996, p. 19). These three dimensions gradually will be associated in complex construction industries, according to one of its titles all at the same time Dedans outside . From 1965, fourth stage in its advance, re-appears thus in its fabrics the human figure, in the middle of indistinct jugs, cups or plates. The topic of the table, combining silhouettes and objects, will not cease any more accompanying its painting: count of the meals, but also of the charts and plays or wandering objects of the “secondhand trades”. In other works of long silhouettes cross, of face or profile, spaces which, without no reference mark, remain more indefinite. Enriched by the experiment of the not-figurative variations of the sign which it continued, Bouqueton returns imperceptibly, with the source of its abstraction, in topics which emerge to measurement of the only play of the forms and the colors. At the time when forms and colors are about to open with another reality that themselves, Bouqueton stops off-centring of it to engage them in another mode of significance. In a climate of unreality, nothing occur to length the moments which its fabrics perennialize, no other event that, suddenly with sharp, the daily being of the beings.

A more recent stage of the course of Bouqueton takes shape, without apparent rupture, on the end of the Années 1980. In its foreseen Paysages it finds, by renewing it, the dimension landscape designer which had characterized its painting. The vision, in false riding prospects, gains there in height, like overhanging the visible one. Solar extents, more intimate interiors or even multiple articulations of two spaces, the painter surprises the signs which start of it the evocation with most extremely of their tension, in on this side any description or narration, at the time when start to appear in them the beings which they have to be able to indicate. With the length of the Years 1990 space unlimited on its fabrics, landscape of the penetrating world until by the windows, table each time in the table, of which the painter perforates his interiors. Like proposer to borrow their glances, its figures contemplate it with further or, in other fabrics immobilized out of any identifiable action in the only being-there of the human condition, seem weakened, stray in the coloured vastness whose ranges go up in intensity. Discovering fabric in fabric a world wild, still undecided, forever dubious, former and foreign with the making safe reference marks of spontaneous perception, the painting of Bouqueton will not cease any more giving to foresee, by purely plastic means, “the fantastic ordinary one” of the visible one.

Judgments

“In a simplification voluntary and breaking with the subject, Bouqueton seeks initially the agreement of pure, indissociable colors of its permanent concern of the light, and that in a rigorous formal balance. The secret bonds that it maintains with nature bring it to develop a harmonious and subtle chromatism. No precise topic decides development of the fabric. It will only appear well afterwards and always in a subjective way rather than concerted. What counts, it is the ordinance of the fabric, starting from the reports/ratios which are established between coloured surface, the depth and the luminous reflections underlain by rhythmic linear. Its pallet, containing yellows, of ochers, brown, reds, gray and white, contributes to the lyricism which characterizes its fabrics of the Sixties, without never harming the spirit of rigor the base of its creation.”

Lydia Harambourg, the School of Paris 1945-1965, Dictionary of the painters , Ides Editions and Calendes, Neuchâtel, 1993 (pp.65-66).

“The visible approximate one with the thresholds of its advent, when the filigree of its long-lived precariousness shivers, Bouqueton succeeds in seizing it not in its appearances, nor even with the surrealist manner beyond, but in on this side, at the first moments of the flow which installs it, in its appearance even. Between the intensity of the color and the uncertainty of the form sudden its reality staggers. In the flame of a candle, Bachelard writing, the being " clignote". The instability in which the painter maintains his signs made appear the instability of the things and the beings, their false permanence in the middle of the duration. By purely plastic means Bouqueton gives to foresee, so quickly, constantly, evacuated, exorcized by the practice to exist, the fantastic ordinary one of any presence, the presence even: he restore in transparency its improbability soft-bitter, in turn luminous and worrying, at any moment fairy-like.”

Michel-Georges Bernard, in Algeria Literature/Action n° 53-54, Paris, 2001 (pp. 243-244).

“Since a score of years, the artist however returned to a formal space, where the overlap of the plans, the articulation of the signs, the subjacent tensions granted to the colors start an account. Figures emergent, interiors are revealed, of the landscapes are suggested by simultaneous spaces into which the elements introduce a new dimension.”

Lydia Harambourg, Marcel Bouqueton, pictorial Imminence , in the Gazette of the Hotel Drouot , December 16th, 2005 (pp. 163-164).

Selective bibliography

Lydia Harambourg, Marcel Bouqueton , Algerian Arts center, Paris, 1989.
Lydia Harambourg, Dictionary of the painters of the School of Paris, 1945-1965 , Ides Editions and Calendes, Neuchâtel, 1993.
Marion Vidal-Bué, Algiers and its painters (1830-1960) , Paris, the Paris-Mediterranean, 2000.
Marcel Bouqueton (texts of Michel-Georges Bernard, extracted from Jean-Bernard Roy, Lydia Harambourg, Djilali Kadid), in Algeria Literature/Action , n° 53-54, Paris, 2001.
Jean Sénac, Faces of Algeria, Glances on art , Paris, the Paris-Mediterranean/Algiers, EDIF 2000,2000.
Michel-Georges Bernard, Marcel Bouqueton, fantastic ordinary of the visible one the , in Artension n° 26, Calluire, November-December 2005 (p. 32).
Gerard Gamand, Bouqueton, With the margins of reality , in Azart n° 17, Paris, November-December 2005 (pp. 128-134).

Internal bond

nonfigurative Painting

External bond

Selection of works * The personal testimony of Marcel Bouqueton

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