Expositions et textes - Odile Boniface

Année	Exposition	Lieu
2021	Salon Bella z'Art	Paris
2019	Puls'art	Le Mans (72)
2018	FIAAC	Pouilly-sur-Loire (58)
2015	Espace Rimbaud	Lyon (69)
2014	Vivart	Albi (81)
2013	Starter Gallery	Paris
2013	Biennale 109	Paris
2011	Red Gate Gallery	Pékin, Chine
2011	Exposition	Poussan
2010	4ème Biennale Internationale d'Art contemporain	Pékin, Chine
2010	Salon Lyon et Sud-Est	Lyon (69)
2010	Puls'art	Le Mans (72)
2009	Biennale 109	Paris
2008	Libr'art	Libramont, Belgique
2008	Espace des Vins et Campanes	Magalas (34)
2007	Chapelle Saint-Pierre	Montbazin (34)
2005	Exposition	Poussan (34)
2003	Galerie Modus	Paris
2003	Galerie Huis Clos	Paris
1996	Cité Internationale des Arts	Paris
1996	Galerie Akka	Cap d'Agde (34)
1995	Galerie Bernet	Paris
1994	Galerie Les Champs Bleus	Paris
1993	Cité internationale des Arts	Paris
1993	Maison des Femmes	Cergy (95)
1993	Musée Sant'Anna del Mare	Espagne
1989	Hôtel du Département	Béziers (34)
1989	Château d'Ô - "89 artistes et la liberté"	Montpellier (34)
1988 - 1989	Salon Figuration Critique	Paris
1988	Salon Grands et Jeunes d'Aujourd'hui	Paris
1988	Théâtre des Arts & Maison du Peuple	Pontoise (95)
1987	Galerie Le Passage	Paris
1983	Galerie Bernanos	Paris
1981	Centre Culturel Conflans-Sainte-Honorine	Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (78)
1981	Centre Beaubourg - "Hommage à Jean Rousselot"	Paris
1980	Cité Internationale des Arts	Paris
1979	Salon de Mai	Paris
1979 1981	Salon Réalités Nouvelles	Paris
1979	Musée Charles Péguy	Orléans (45)
1979	Galerie Saint-Paul	Paris
1978	Galerie des Beaux-Arts	Paris
1977	Centre Culturel	Boulogne (92)
1977	Salon Toulon-Draguignan	Var (83)
1976	Galerie des Beaux-Arts	Paris

Texts and testimonials

To begin a painting is to place oneself in the silence of all things, in conscious forgetting so that the hand can connect to memories, to imagination, to improvisation, to intuition.

For me, the act of painting is linked to the land, to the immense freedom it offers, to solitude certainly, but also to sharing, and to sharing life and beauty. In fact, everything is just a pretext; giving meaning doesn't seem necessary to me; something compels me to paint anyway.

If the abstraction of my beginnings and abstraction in general had not seemed so sclerotic to me, we go around in circles inside ourselves, I would have stopped there, the subject as such never interested me.

It was gradually that I turned to nature, as if it were obvious, it was there. My approach is not linked to a desire to represent or bear witness, except perhaps to the fleeting nature of a moment. I like to dwell in undefined, infinite territories, between figuration and abstraction, imagination and reality, the place of all possibilities.

For me, painting is an arrangement of colors, harmonies, and dissonances, just like the landscape and vegetation, sculpted by shadow and light. This familiar yet archaic nature, stifling yet protective, sometimes unsettling, vibrates, tears itself apart, is pierced by the light, and expands.

Like a photographer of emotion, during my wanderings I seek out that fleeting moment when the light is such that, through a sudden alchemy, a simple piece of landscape becomes a magical, mysterious, supernatural universe, the subject disappearing. I love the autumn light and this season for this reason, because the living and the dead mingle and make the melancholy more acute.

Because of a very personal framing, I show a piece of the world, a fragment of the surroundings, knowing that the smallest twig contains a reflection of the whole world.

The surroundings are here, not far away, around the workshop, outside; I am looking for enchantment but also a relationship to what I see, a sharing of the gaze.

I sometimes carry these impressions within me for a long time before they resurface on the canvas, and the act of painting becomes an improvisation around patches of color that makes the imperceptible visible.

The density and complexity of plant life compels me to layer paint as if I were stacking several canvases or artworks on top of one another. Each layer is a painting in itself, corresponding to an emotional state; each layer leaves its mark. This is the source of the almost three-dimensional depth found in my paintings. The light and detail emerge from below, from within, at the intersection of the lyrical and the intimate.

Odile Boniface paints on a thread, like a tightrope walker suspended above the void, the void before genesis, the gaping void of not painting.

She walks this tightrope, on the edge of reality and unreality, in this tiny space where life and death are juxtaposed, complement each other, respond to each other, intertwine, with a keen awareness of the drama or the purpose of living.

It is within nature itself that the artist has always drawn her inspiration: "because," she says, "apart from certain works of art and faces, it is for me the unique place of all feelings, of all emotions, in a perpetual renewal; it is also the place of beauty."

Her relationship with nature is quite unique: it is an osmosis, a constant and essential exchange. The artist uses an element of nature as a pretext for creation, and the painting is inscribed within a space-time continuum. The space is delimited by the frame of the painting and by the space of the studio, but time itself is vast. Time is the artist's history, intrinsically linked to that of humanity, the time of memories, but it is also the time necessary for the work, for the creation of the artwork. "A very long time," she says, but it is the same time that engenders the succession of seasons, that causes fallen leaves to accumulate and form the humus of the earth. Each layer of paint applied is a memory for the painting, and the accumulation of layers, over the necessary time, creates a creative humus. This work is rooted in duration, accumulation, and slowness.

There is no figuration as such, no illusionism (or representation), just an intrinsic knowledge of both the subject and the craft.

We remember the large oil paintings with their exuberant vegetation; Odile Boniface, inevitably encountering the pitfalls of perfect mastery of gesture and technique, has refined the form. We thus find vast expanses of silence where the patient work with the material and the exaltation of color sometimes border on abstraction. It is a work on paper of great pictorial richness, a "mixed" technique that combines ink, pastels, and oil. A nuanced work that subtly moves back and forth between reality and imagination, Chinese print and fresco, and situates itself with a very personal awareness on the edge of the defined.

Following an abstract, luminous and temperate period, marked by atmospheric suggestions, after her time at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Odile Boniface exiled herself from the capital in order to reconsider the pictorial evolution of her project.

Since abstraction no longer provided the answers she sought, and her new home, surrounded by nature, played a compensatory role, she decided to gradually turn to interpreting the obvious. And she now perceived this obviousness both in the visible world and in her imagination; like travel impressions gleaned from exotic forests.

She confronts these territories from both the outside and the inside, revealing their hidden essence, their pungent scent, the dampness of the foliage. Reality lightens, the field expands, placing each element in its proper position, enhanced by the luminous fluidity of the untouched areas. An apparent silence reigns in these stark landscapes, which speak to us of wildlife with a poignant modesty; the idea intervenes in the filter of reality only to refine the relevance of the rendering. A confident graphic style, supported by a precise balance of the subtlest tonal values and a supple arrangement of forms, conveys the pictorial viability of the painting. Throughout its transhumance, the marmoset becomes a pretext, and Odile Boniface gives life and depth to her world.

Odile Boniface's painting over the past 20 years has been a long, sometimes painful, always subterranean maturation, carried out in solitude and silence, often tinged with doubt. It is the work of a craftsman as much as an artist, demanding, timeless, constantly revisiting the piece, never finished because it is always perfectible. From the abstraction of her early canvases to figuration, it is the story of a genesis. From the initial silence, the point of origin, the line, the chaos, the questioning of colored matter, emerged form, landscape, animal—a world between the imaginary and the real.

The monkeys are there, motionless, signs of humanity's inescapable presence, integrated into nature itself. They pose questions. Today they blend in or disappear amidst the lush vegetation. The symbolism is left to the viewer's interpretation. The painter's inner light, the richness of sensations heightened by color, the transparency of matter, the vibration of air or water—slowly, for a very long time, life takes shape. In these latest canvases, there is a culmination.

Her clear eyes penetrated the imaginary realm, restoring to it the appearance of its depth. The elegance of her gesture bent forms to their reality and ceaselessly inspired the movement of a new day.

Everything happened from dusk till dawn.

His vision left on the canvas a fantastic and bare landscape after the deluge, the eruption, the explosion, the chaos.

His palette is an alchemy and his canvas vibrates with highly nuanced waves and shadows.

Genesis or unknown land? Before or after, always a time of peace in between. We see rocks that are no longer rocks, desert rivers, lost plains, formless mountains, beaches at low tide caught in the net of the horizon. Infinite gentleness of a planetary meditation, perpetual slowness.

As a poet, she confronts her instinct with a tragic consciousness.

She has the youth of purity and the experience of years of craftsmanship. She has the power of a parabolic love which she translates by playing with colours with effusion, in diffusion, in perfusion, in profusion, in a unitary cellular and organic assemblage which patiently remakes the space where the eye, the hand and the sole weight of the soul pass.

In the Péguy room, Odile Boniface's canvases place us squarely in a world that is not our finite and constructed universe. Abstract painting, certainly, but an abstraction that is space, with vast movement, where forms emerge in fusion, seeking balance in the crackling of vivid and primal energy.

The colors themselves evoke this beginning. Through the cold, Antarctic colors, emanating from the gray of nothingness, and the dominant mauve in all its variations, isn't a transition being expressed, from emptiness to birth, to life, to fiery red? The color seems to take shape, to be born as if on a painter's palette.

Odile Boniface captures the beginning in its immensity, but also in its microscopic finesse; this second impression is particularly suggested by the pastels where the lines and bridges seem animated by a purely microbial life. Here the painter multiplies visions of stratifications, of fissures like the folds of an organic tissue: "lines right side up and upside down."

"The canvas is created as it is being made," she says, "no preconceived plan, therefore no background," and her painting develops a cosmological space driven by powerful and vast forces; vital forces that oppose each other, gushing and falling, flowing and exploding, painting the movement in a rain of colored spots, seeking to regroup into denser forms calling in their quest for balance, for construction, the light line that seems to finish, to support the whole.

In the black painting, this calm, ocular circle, in the slowness of its formation, carries the mystery of this world, whose dynamism perhaps finds its source in the compelling need that drives Odile Boniface to paint what is her inner world.

We were able to see about twenty recent canvases by Odile Boniface, whose youth does not, surprisingly, preclude maturity and technical mastery.

Matter is his subject. It's not about coloring a form, but about working (within) the material until the form emerges of its own accord. These are large oil paintings where a granular, mineral, or aquatic chaos unfolds, revealing a landscape of limbo, of the beyond; or small surfaces in ink, oil pastels, gouache: gnarled, rough like bark, imprints like engravings. The cut, the tear, the slit, the notch run through these canvases like a theme: glimpsed lips, a sketched vulva, a barely opened wound, an effervescent swelling that a line bursts open. The tension, bordering on vibration, is embodied in diptychs or triptychs. Finally, poems add to the dramatic aspect of this young work when calligrams penetrate the color of their design, when a palimpsest gives word to matter, lending sound to this universe where the feminine unconscious is inscribed.

Odile Boniface - Painter

Exhibitions and texts

Texts and testimonials

Rewards

1981 :

- Bourse d’encouragement à la Création Artistique, Ministère des Affaires Culturelles

- Prix de la Fondation de France