Vincent Bioulès

Vincent Bioulès never tires of the landscapes he calls home and which the light is always changing. “The landscape has a face. The right side of the Pic Saint-Loup is extraordinarily difficult to draw. If a feature or a fracture is not in the right place, it doesn't look the same. A landscape is a comprehensive arrangement of feelings that the painter picks up on and the emotion they feel at that moment is a result of the perfection of this arrangement. It is not about producing a copy, but about expressing the reasoning within.” (La Nostalgie du Paysage, Musée Fabre)

Vincent Bioulès studied at the École des Beaux-Arts of Montpellier in the late 1950s and discovered his interest for painting at a very young age. He has fond memories of the exhibitions he visited with his parents, the artists he met and painting the family home on Avenue Saint-Lazare, etc. Back then, you only had to walk for fifteen minutes to find yourself surrounded by nature. Montpellier was not yet surrounded by motorways. Landscape has always been his chosen subject. In the 1960s, the artist was a worthy representative for his generation. He became one of the most active and most inventive protagonists of ABC Production and then Supports/Surfaces alongside Daniel Dezeuze and Claude Viallat.

Since he returned to figurative art in the 1970s, he has devoted his time to his landscapes of choice, but not exclusively. He painted series of watermelons, interiors, portraits, nudes, memories and much more. He also produced his own take on the great themes in painting, such as scenes of ancient mythology or biblical scenes from the Old and New Testament. The artist portrayed Apollo leaving his motorbike behind to run after Daphne in jeans and a jacket, and Tobias is seen chatting to the angel at the foot of the Pic Saint-Loup. When Vincent Bioulès paints, he never knows what is going to happen. The mountain is presented in a different light each time. He begins with an idea, but then the paint decides on the path. The peak surges out from the earth, driven by a nurturing energy. The clouds add a dramatic touch to the scene. The painter likes to imagine them sculpted in stone. Everything is about light.

At the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, Vincent Bioulès is exhibiting around forty canvases devoted to his landscapes in the Château’s Upper Galleries.

Vincent Bioulès was born in 1938. He lives and works in Montpellier. In the 1960s, he joined the artists who had all at some point considered abstract art as objective progress. In 1970, he played a part in the founding of Supports/Surfaces alongside Claude Viallat and Daniel Dezeuze. At this point, Bioulès painted vertical, monochrome panels which reduced his painting down to a basic language of pure colours and an absence of subjectivity. In so doing, he abandoned his expertise and the cultural and emotional ties that connected him to the past.

In 1972, he left Supports/Surfaces declaring that the quest for this collective freedom was detrimental to his own freedom of expression. Once he was no longer bound by this avant-garde approach, he rediscovered the simple pleasure of drawing and painting. This change is to be seen as an evolution rather than a separation, a transfer of his abstract learnings to his own style.

The landscapes he paints are based on images from memory that he has captured in his mind several times at different points in the day and then recreated in his studio. He explores colour and light in direct compositions with jagged, synthetic shapes, inventing a new complexity. His artworks portray “what is irreplaceable in the moment” and a touch of his experience with abstract art can be seen in his work. “What I produce today would not exist without my prior experience in abstract art.” He therefore became one of the major artists to return to figurative art in France.

Vincent Bioulès is represented by the Galerie La Forest Divonne.