The Artist
There is a discipline that looks like ease.
A painting you can sit with, return to, rest against - one that restores rather than excites - is rarely the product of casualness. It is the product of decades of reduction. Of learning what to take away.
Bertrand de Vismes has been painting for sixty years. What you see in his work is not abundance. It is what remains.
The influences are precise
Cézanne taught him to see the world as geometry - sphere, cone, cylinder - which he flattens further into circle, triangle, rectangle. Large areas of colour, held in tension.
From Matisse, the courage of the flat plane. From Staël, the mastery of grey - the real mark of a colourist, who is not someone who loads a canvas with colour but someone who knows how to harmonise the greys.
Colour, in his hands, is density rather than decoration. You do not copy what you see. You intensify it - to render, on a small rectangle of paper, the emotion produced by something vast: a mountain range, an expanse of water, a Mediterranean afternoon.
Modigliani for line. And the lesson that a single detail - a strand of hair, the arm of a chair - can carry the weight of a whole composition.
The great poster artists too: Villemot and his generation, who understood that reduction is not poverty but precision.
The method follows the philosophy
It begins outside. Sketches made in the open air - along the Basque coast (France), in Provence, in Venice - are the raw material. Back in the studio, composition and colour are pushed further. The spontaneity survives. The scale expands.
The drawing must be impeccable. Drawing is the probity of art, as Ingres said. The composition closes in on itself; the subject must hold within the space assigned to it. Light comes from contrast. Rhythm from the play of curves and counter-curves.
Once all of this is in place, there is room for the accident. The unplanned mark that the preparation made possible.
The execution may take five minutes. The sixty years are already in it.
The viewer is not a passive recipient
An interrupted line must be completed by the eye. A suggested volume finished by the mind. The painting does not explain itself - the artist must cut out his tongue, Matisse said. It asks the person in front of it to remain active, to participate in what is not quite finished.
This is why simplicity is the hardest discipline. When the means are reduced, nothing can be hidden. No room for error, and no way to disguise one.
More emotion in Saturn's rings seen through a bad telescope than in any computer-generated image of them. The simpler the means, the more the sensibility shows through.
Three words: sobriety, sobriety, sobriety.
To own one is to own something singular
There is a particular quality to living with a painting that does not shout. It becomes part of the room, then part of how you see. You stop noticing it as a painting and start noticing what it does to the light, to the wall, to the silence around it. That is what Bertrand de Vismes is after - and why his work tends to stay, across decades, in the collections of people who know what they are looking at.
He exhibits regularly across France and Europe, and has shown repeatedly in Toulouse and Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
His originals hang in private collections across France, including alongside works by Marquet and Bonnard.
Each original is unique, hand-painted, and accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity. There will be no second version.
"The joy of living is the common thread running through my work. More than words, I prefer to let my brushes do the talking."
Selected Exhibitions
Atelier d'encadrement Corinne Laborde, St Jean-de-Luz, France (*On View*)
Galerie Chaye, Honfleur, France (*On View*)
Galerie Maringer, St Polten, Austria (*On View*)
Galerie Saint Michel, Paris (*On View*)
Le Salon du Dessin et de la Peinture a l'eau (regular exhibitor), Grand Palais, Paris 2006-2011
Galerie Claire de Villaret, Paris
Galerie Everarts, Paris
Galerie Art présent, Paris
Galerie Pippa, Paris
Phone Régie, Paris
Mairie du 6ème, Paris
Librairie Lardanchet, Paris
Palais de Chaillot / Vente de la Marine, Paris
Galerie des boulistes, Paris
Gras Savoye, Neuilly, France
Les passions de Tom, Versailles, France
Quintessence, Versailles, France
Carré à la farine, Versailles, France
Le Cap Seguin, Boulogne Billancourt, France
Entre nous, Meudon, France
Galerie Cyane, Nancy, France
Galerie Mary Wind, St Martin-de-Re, Ile de Re, France
Galerie Alain Viguier, St Martin-de-Re, Ile de Re, France
Atelier de Titanne, La Bastide Clairence, France
Restaurant Cum laude / Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany
Publications / Books
Venezia Vivace, Collection Patrimoine "Des Pierres et des Ailes", 2019
