Almost a hero.

The crazy thing is that in art, much the same thing is happening at the same time. Artists begin to produce through what has been called a gesture. An artist’s gesture, a consecrated gesture, a super gesture, endlessly recognizable and identifiable. An artist’s whole life reduced to a gesture, an approach, a technique, a posture, a concept. We have the one who takes off, the one who accumulates, the one who crushes, the one who makes dots, coulures and monochromes. For one, it’s tautology, for the other, it’s bands of color, the size of the brush… This curious propensity to reduce and isolate the artistic gesture has been given the baptismal name radicality. I have to say that if there’s one thing in the world that terrifies me and gives me nightmares, it’s this radicalism. I know the world has become fond of the instant recognition offered by this kind of hypertrophy of expression, but as an artist, I’d rather die tomorrow than submit to it. (*)

A few years later, he launched a series of paintings, Les Quasi Héros, whose power is shaky, incomplete or simply useless, banal, even off-putting. He tells us that he prefers Sixteen Donkeys, the hero who comes out of nowhere and simplifies reality into geometric figures. But Sixteen Donkeys, translated into French, is Seize Ânes (Pronounce Cezanne)…

(*) Interview with Vincent Bernière (2009).