Bernard Vidal by Serge Lenczner
Today, before an art historian can legitimize an artist's work, s/he must analyze the artist's career path, reflect upon the timeliness of the works' originality in its own time, and then consider it as an innovation on a historical level.
In its quest for the sensational, contemporary art has intellectualized its view of the world, thus distancing itself from reality. A ubiquitous ugliness emanates from enigmatic stagings of the sordid, where the ephemeral takes stock of all things temporal. However, contemporary art is polymorphous, and its polysemy allows for other aesthetic values that are more firmly rooted in the dissemination of beauty.
Far from any cold, antiseptic, minimalist art, the work of the artist Bernard 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 a person to the point of ecstasy, creating a connection with the world by capturing its light and color. A person 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 and harmony.
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. Vidal 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.
No other artist in modernity has incorporated all of these rhythms and movements into a single space. The way in which he crystallizes these different sensual formulations into one chromatic syntax is an innovation in art.
The power of his semantics and skilled creative range allows a person to focus on Vidal's gestures.
These lively and intuitive gestures assert the immediacy of the transcendence of self. They impregnate into his art an energy that (like Matisse before him) calls on former traditions and evokes the heritage of yore.
In order to avoid both the commonplace and primitive archaisms, remember that when Bernard Vidal declines his contemporary identity it is because of his resistance to the arbitrariness of simplistic dominant currents. 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.
Bernard Vidal's works reveal that painting can never be completed; it endures within itself. It is like an ocean that crashes against a rosy granite coast—immense and impassable—recycling and drawing in itself, a constant truth reformulated.
There is a reality in Vidal's works that does not evaporate at the threshold of the visible. It illustrates the temptation to replace the current alienations of the present landscape with an age-old ode to life.