Bernard Dufour Peintures
About the exhibition
Dufour devotes the majority of his work to the representation of the female body, in a deliberately anti-idealized painting style. He shows raw flesh, everyday poses, a direct sexuality. He seeks physical presence, sometimes disturbing, by rejecting any decorative eroticism. The model is not a symbol, but a being exposed, almost dissected by the gaze.
This approach places him in a tradition where painting becomes a borderline experience rather than an aesthetic representation.
Dufour reads and admires Georges Bataille. Several Bataillean themes appear in his work: eroticism as an experience of truth, transgression, the proximity between sexuality and death, the disappearance of boundaries between the looking subject and the looked-at object.
This is not a philosophical illustration, but a pictorial equivalence: what Bataille thinks, Dufour attempts to paint