Kate MacGarry is pleased to present Bernard Piffaretti’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring paintings from the 80s and 90s, a foundational period in the artist’s practice.
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.”
Bernard Piffaretti was born in 1955 in Saint-Etienne, France and lives and works in Paris. Since 1986 Piffaretti has committed his practice to the ‘duplication method’, abstract paintings that appear to be two identical halves split through the vertical axis. Closer inspection reveals moments of differentiation: the inclination of the brushstrokes, the number of drips, the weight of the hue. “The duplication clouds the origin of the time of the work. All supremacy is abolished, and that is the subject of my painting”.
Solo exhibitions include XXL, Ceysson & Bénétière, Wandhaff, Luxembourg (2025); Je n’ai jamais peinte un tableau récent, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Pour finir encore, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris (2024); Kombi, Klemm’s, Berlin (2023); Ridgeline, Kate MacGarry, London (2022); Pick Up, Lisson Gallery, New York (2022); Twin Peaks and Company, Lisson Gallery, Shanghai (2021) and Double, Blanc International Contemporary Art Space, Beijing (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Hors Format, MAMC, Saint-Etienne, France (2024); Repetition, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023); The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2022); Collection. La composante Peinture, FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France (2019); Abstraction/Figuration, Musée des Beaux Arts de Rennes, Rennes, France (2015) and Cycle futur antérieur, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland (2010).
Piffaretti’s work is included in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc-Jean, Luxembourg; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France amongst others.
