Yves Bélorgey

For the last thirty or so years, Yves Bélorgey’s paintings and drawings have been square, 240 cm on each side. The unity of format and technique is complemented by unity of subject and method. The artist’s work is a vast exploration of housing projects that popped up all over the world in the 1950s-1970s. These constructions represent the bequest of modernity to our daily lives. Yves Bélorgey is sensitive to the formal proximity of these buildings to geometrical abstraction paintings. The choice of a square format, neither landscape, nor portrait, underscores this. Similarly, the sheer size of the paintings is a legacy of the "space conquests" of American abstract expressionism of the fifties. As a way to take up the baton of that heroic past, painting a modern building with a squared-off facade allows Yves Bélorgey to shift the painting’s plane into the perspectivist space and to switch from the era of abstraction to its representation. For a long time, his pictures focused on the construction alone: few or no signs of life, no human figures, no indication of the season, and so on.

Since the artist has already used buildings in the Mirail district for his paintings, Le Printemps de septembre commissioned another series on this famous Toulouse housing project. So Yves Bélorgey went back to complete his photographic archive. The subsequent exhibition testifies to important developments in his practice, of which we can mention three. Firstly, life and the living – vegetation and human – are far more present. Then, from his encounters with the buildings’ inhabitants come these paintings of interiors, where the occupants pose against the backdrop of their domestic life. And finally, dissatisfied by the gulf between drawings and paintings, he sought to reduce it by developing a new technique that he has named "pigmentary painting," which consists in applying colored pigments straight onto the canvas, as he would the graphite of his drawings. This unity of technique demands real virtuosity because it excludes correction. And so Yves Bélorgey’s work enters a new era having found a path both to technical renewal and human intensification. Like the lame devil of Lesage’s eponymous novel (1707), the artist breaks free of the walls of private lives to paint intimate spaces and the people who inhabit them. Having fallen back on the modern style of abstraction for so long, Yves Bélorgey has repositioned himself in the other tradition of modern art, which various realisms have followed by turning their attention on the real world, where the men and women of our times live. In doing so, he expands on the work of, for instance, Jürg Kreienbühl, who was recently rediscovered in France, where he worked away from the mainstream, in slums and then in the housing projects that replaced them.

With the support of La Fondation des artistes and ppa architectures.