Fine Art Magazine
Born in France in August 1944, Bernard Vidal voyages deeply into the realm of the color field world, combining a pleine aire intimacy with nature with the vibrancy of a fauve in creating landscapes that bring color, form and content to new levels of intensity and boldness. His exhibit last year at United Nations in New York met great success with some of his paintings commanding up to $50,000. This January, 2007, he is exhibiting works at “Carroussel du Louvre” and at the gallery Dreyfus Paris. Other exhibits are planned in Europe and Shanghai.
When the artist is not travelling, he lives and paints a part of the year in Britain, and the rest at Paris.
Here we tempt to analyze for Fine Art Magazine the originality and the innovation of Bernard Vidal's oeuvre.
Bernard Vidal's fascination with high-keyed colors as well as his diverse methods of transcending one's self is what makes the revival of this type of painting significant. Far from any cold, antiseptic, minimalist art, the work of the Vidal represents an exclamation, a command to be reborn into a glorified world. By invoking the mythical qualities of nature and playing with the registers of seduction, Vidal's work can push the viewer to the point of ecstasy, creating a connection with the world by capturing its light and color. He is confronted with a pictorial process that combines an aesthetic ideal and a philosophical choice to sublimate life, space, sun and infinity. Ideas of permanence and fantasy transcend his canvases. Their chromatic extravaganza absolves them of any overly-sentimental beauty or decorative way.
Here the artist incorporates many different artistic techniques into one pictorial dream. In his landscapes, symbolically-saturated forms coexist with other more cryptic references, and details blend into the paint with subtle execution, approaching the abstract.
Fauvism, tachism, pointillism, post-impressionism, and with certain strokes, illustrative references to Paul Gauguin, intimately mingle in his works. The emphasis of his lyrical narrative produces a contemporary link between the creative spirit and the pigments in his paintings.
His approach cannot be properly described in terms of Romanticism, but more in terms of a necessity that guides his hyperbolic gestures and that exhales a poetic detachment, creating the primordial reality of his colors.
No other artist in modernity has combined all of these rhythms and movements into a single space.
Bernard Vidal's works reveal that painting can never be completed; it endures within itself. It is like the ocean that crashes against the rosy granite coast, immense and impassable, recycling and drawing in itself, a constant truth reformulated.
SERGE LENCZNER / FINE ART MAGAZINE / NEW YORK 2007