BERNARD PIFFARETTI

Each work begins with a single vertical line painted down the centre, an unfolding from canvas to canvas that has neither beginning nor end. This line of demarcation becomes a symbol of Piffaretti’s desire to make a “metapictorial work”, one that questions and experiments with the idea of the picture itself. A composition is painted on one side of the line, le premier temps, before being recreated on the other, le second temps. The first pictorial gesture becomes the matrix for the second. The interval between the two stages of the painting becomes visible. This recreation allows the artist to reconsider the first composition and improvise upon it, admitting imperfection into the process. Which side is painted first is unimportant: each painting is a rupture, begun before it starts and unfinished when the second side is complete.

The artist’s dessins après tableaux (drawings after pictures) reverse the usual chronology of painting. Made after rather than before, the work on canvas is the preparation, and the drawing becomes a caption or subtitle. There is an element of looseness and freedom to the drawings, bringing the paintings to a close while at the same time leaving them unfinished. They carry their own imperfections, born of the same act of reproduction that shapes the paintings themselves.

Piffaretti’s work continues to resist the idea of the picture as a fixed image, insisting instead on the structure of painting as its true subject. The result is a practice built on repetition and variation, in which nothing is finished but simply resumes between one work and the next. As he notes, “I can declare that I have painted only one painting in 45 years: ‘The painting’ of painting. It is the structure of the painting that is the true subject of the event and of the meaning, as an affirmation of the mental, even conceptual, context of my pictorial practice.”

Courtesy Kate MacGarry.