Bernard Vidal by Gérard Xuriguera
The need to label appearances, despite conceptual one-upmanship and temporary prejudices, stems from a society that wants to restore emotional power to the visible.
Bonnard, who belonged to a category of painters in love with open spaces, oceans and rivers, the sky and vast horizons, trees and shrubbery, humus in general, and the simple things in life, said that “Art cannot occur without nature”.
Thus, Bernard Vidal, who has continually affirmed a close relationship with nature—based on his ability to instantly seize what his eye notices and his memory collects–reinterprets it in a multitude of rhythms and sweet and gliding values.
Acquainted with the bustling topographies and damp heaths of the Brittany coast, as much as he is the sunny climate of the Mediterranean and the morning freshness of the Caribbean trade winds, Vidal collects these shifting atmospheres with a frank sensuality, reuniting his raw perception with his inner needs.
Vidal challenges theories by not taking refuge behind the analysis of his methods. His observations must act on his subject in the moment, motivated by the perfection of movement, in tune with his intuition.
A beneficiary of a long tradition of landscapists, Bernard Vidal is little by little distancing himself from the remnants of what he has learned—even if on the surface of his work there are certain reminders of the Nabis and Fauvism movements—in order to narrow his vocabulary not to a subject, but to a unifying concept: nature in all its conditions, captured in a fleecy movement. This is depicted most often with the tree, with which Vidal identifies and transcribes through a suggested feeling, following the examples of non-Western artists.
This crystallizing alternative, which corresponds to his vision of existence, does not mean that Vidal is unaware that a painting exists only where it creates and rips open the numerous questions of reality. As a result, there are opportunities to search for truth, which are subjected to the filter of Vidal’s subjectivity. He does not strive to create an ideal world because he knows that the referent is a decoy otherwise fashioned, a mere pretext. Gustave Moreau said, “I only believe what I do not see, and purely what I feel”.
Therefore, in lush surroundings, which also includes periods of abandonment, the themes enchain and articulate themselves in a solid and harmonious logic…Among others: “Sentier sur la Côte” (Coastal Trail) creates a balance between a stippled arm of the sea and slashed cliffs crowned with undulating clouds; “Le Pin Rouge” (The Red Pine) with curved musculature and branches dancing on water constellated with brushstrokes; “Soir sur la Côte” (Evening on the Coast), an enormous mass of reddening clouds only just allowing to emerge the austere architecture of a one-dimensional jutting lighthouse as well as an isolated house overhanging a calm sea; “Méditerranée” (Mediterranean), another scene of a pine tree surrounded by abounding vegetation with the embankment seen in falling perspective; “Les Rochers Rouges” (The Red Boulders), where two small silhouettes in the lower part of the painting merge with their surroundings; and again the sensible flower bouquets on tables or an Antilles beach in shadowy light...
The colors of summer or spring by and large give these compositions strong and modulated flavors, which combine both the lived and the imagined in their contrasting fluxes. They are accompanied by the voluntarily clashing impact of colors, matching the distinctive color traits of which Degas spoke: “Red colors, green neutralizes, purple darkens”. In addition, rays of light—concentrated, fragmented or branched—combined with the arrested swell which adds life to these marine, terrestrial, and vegetal metamorphoses, contribute to the synthesis of the work’s execution.
Through these equivalences and colorful images, Bernard Vidal never avoids the recognizable, above all declaring his passion for the ocean. This ocean with endlessly renewed turmoil teaches us that, according to Hegel, “Time is the essence of being”. The ocean never stops reminding us of this.
If man is one with nature, the artist never stops grasping at it and dreaming of it, delving into, according to J. Lescure, “this renewed space which repeats itself in its limits and in its very condition”. At the same time, with his refined technique, his demanding methods to which he dedicates himself, and the bracing effect of the interpretation, Bernard Vidal knows that life is a sequence of fragile moments.
With harmonies sometimes resonating, sometimes muffled, nothing is spontaneous in his paintings. Beyond the landscapes seemingly at peace, solitude lurks. Therefore, what matters in his works is not representation in itself, but what lies hidden in its contorted serenity.