IB66 - 2007/17 : 94 x 59 cm. Impression sur vélin.
IB66 - 2007/17 : 94 x 59 cm. Impression sur vélin.
«Bertrand Flour's artistic fiber»
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«Painting»
Bertrand Flour is keen on painting, because in addition of his training at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, he has long roamed the Louvre Museum. Got him to draw the Ancients in the presence of Paul Guimezanes (second Rome's prize of engraving and former member of the Casa of Velázquez) in the Departement of the Greek antiquities, Etruscans and Romanes, his fascination for the Beauty was total. This «hand-crafted» learning of the painter's trade has given him at a time to acquire basis and a certain rigour. We feel it especially in his line drawings (ink pen), made with an extreme delicateness, comparable to the marble's purity; he is a mannered artist in the same way as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Botticelli, Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Ingres and so many other famous masters have also fed his imaginary, while he was predestined to computorised graphic arts. His taste for the Italian Renaissance or else the Fontainebleau's School with Clouet engraves itself in his works on the computer; Bertrand Flour is only bringing out his painter's qualities.
«All that emanates from my being comes from this unshakable love for painting.»
Bertrand Flour and Paul Guimezanes at the Louvre Museum in 1988-© Jacques Loïc
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«Method»
My computer images are realised in the manner of the Ancients, that is to say progressively rising and uniformely the background in shades (red) before putting colour (this painting's ancestral technique permits to raise the subject with shards of light), but my artistic process especially consists of saving the successive stages tied to the creation's process assisted by the computer.
I use an «electronic stylus» as well as a «graphic tablet» for drawing visual on the screen before having defined an arbitrary format which corresponds to the real dimension of the printed image.
The different internal functions of the graphic software used allow me then to recast my image in accordance with aesthetic criterias which are not so far from the pictural classicism.
A computerised graphic work is so the result of many successive stages in the same way as a master's painting, that is why first of all I concentrate on the tree view of the subject.
The numerical printing is the final phase also requiring a savoir-faire for materialising my images, because machines are only vulgar tools that the plastic artist has to manipulate with ease. »
Bertrand Flour, in line with David, is distinguishable because of his taste for modernity.
«I am terribly classical in spite of my fascination for the electronic arts.»
«I aspire to a new art with pictorial resonances.»
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«Art and Medecine»
Bertrand Flour likes to dissect the human body because it contains the life. A rare matter that the intellect sublimates at the discretion of fantaysis. It's Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical plates which have captivated his attention and he has a real fascination for the physicist Andrea Vesalius' works.
His passion for the purple red of our carved flesh is a manner to touch the quintessence.
Bertrand Flour incises with his pencil a marvellous and fragile epidermis.
«I like to dissect the flesh with an imaginary scalpel.»
«To observe the smallest veins of human body is an infinite ecstasy.»
«The human body is a heap of keen flesh.»
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«Art and Religion»
Bertrand Flour is agnostic, and yet sensible to the «Pensées» of Pascal. His heart vibrates according to his emotions; nothing really destines him to the biblical message if it's not the emblematic cross.
«This religious sign finishs to haunt myself while nothing in me is coming from Catholicism. »
«My being cannot differently live than without religion in this occult world where the divine light surpasses all forms of belief.»
«God is the absolute truth in all disoriented being.»
«My being cannot submit to the authority of a religion.»
«Live without dogmatism is the principal liberty that my being alone cannot transgress without losing faith.»
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«Art and Cosmogony»
Bertrand Flour likes to sound out the cosmic black: regenerative substance for beings taken with spirituality.
The univers' fringes are circles than the-inspired-creator fit in a part of his brain. Nothing cannot distort his overflowing imagination which swell itself from so many original matter.
Obscur worlds left to the Poet (celestial star).
«Troubling sensation than that total black espousing the dreams.»
«My soul roams in the celestial delight.»
«This eternal black take away our lonely souls.»
«A saint obscurity seep across the void.»
«Touch the Eternal by sounding obscurity.»
«Work on the absolute black as like if nothing cannot be more stronger than the void.»
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«Art and Femininity»
Bertrand Flour is captivated by woman, especially if she is becoming his muse. This goddess with breasts naked inebriate his spirit by lulling him with romantic desires.
Aphrodite and her concubines have weaved a golden thread around his being…
«Her body is a blazing armor versus the adversity that the Poet covers with tender kisses.»
«Her neck in alabaster with thousand of intoxicating parfums.»
«Her beauty in my captivated being transports me to Kythera.»
«So many women with the sparkling beauty who trouble my soul.»
«My heart become enamoured of so much love, so many beauties!»
«Divine artwork with unequaled contours.»
«Your hair is the most sparkling diadems.»
«Her heart clinched with diamonds shines in the firmament.»
«Her hair is a jewellery case with multicolor sparkles.»
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«Drawings»
A discontinuous (black) line (barely visible) on a white background, composed of lines and points, surrounds the outlines of the female body which is subject to a poetic interpretation (airy) of the goddess Aphrodite that Bertrand Flour skims with a thin metal tip of which quality underlies imagination.
These drawings deliberately refined even minimalist with a decorative style are imprint of musicality if like the artist himself wanted to notify his own sensibility across a oniric vision of the woman that the Poet, smitten of romantic feelings, reveals at the face of the world.
«A simple sheet of paper and an (black) ink pencil is enough for me to represent the beauty of Venus leaving ramble my imagination in accordance with a comparable graphic to certain tanagras.»
Drawing N°5103-2018: «Woman's chest».
Tanagra-Hellenistic period-Greek.
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«Background»
Turn to imaginary, Bertrand Flour, before coming a real artist searching his own identity, drawn his inspiration to a large number of painters known as modern, like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Miró, Picasso, Modigliani, Tanguy, Chagall, etc., but his greatest pride has been to make his first steps side M. Marot (Drawing professor at College Chantenay-Nantes) who taught him the intaglio «ex gratia» and allowed him at fifteen years old to enter at École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in the engraving workshop of Paul Guimezanes.
It’s at the library of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes that Bertrand Flour, at the dawn of his sixteenth year, documents himself on the pictorial art by reading numerous painter’s notebooks, of which those of Delacroix and Leonardo da Vinci. Desirous of learning the rudiments of the painter’s trade, he applies the «recips» of Xavier de Langlais (The technique of the oil painting) and of André Lhote (Treaty of the paysage and the figure), then he enlarges his universe across the writings of Marc Havel (The painting’s technique) and of René Huygue (Formes and forces); next he refers himself to his «masters» at Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Regular visitor at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes et de Paris, George de la Tour awakens within him a base of mysticism, Philippe de Champaigne a surprising authority, Puvis de Chavannes a strange serenity: thus in his spirit, he models such and such painter. Giotto and Fra Angelico are both of them the references, unmissable, at the outset, but it is the writings of Cennino Cennini (Treaty of the painting) and of Théophile le moine (Treaty of the diverse arts) which were at the origin of his irrepressible love for the painting.
Patinir, Friedrich, Bruegel, Arcimboldo, Bosch… came one by one to haunt him from his early adolescence; well it’s by impregnating himself of so many masterpieces that Bertrand Flour-at the beginning of the nineties-decides to consecrate himself to the informatic art (images) by claiming that the easel painting is not taught at its current fair value and does not reflects our society.