Bruno Perramant: The Garden of Delights

The GEM is about to become the first museum ever to hold a one-man exhibition by French painter Bruno Perramant (b. Brest, 1962). Perramant uses traditional methods to get to grips with contemporary visual culture – his seductive paintings feature a blend of figurative and abstract approaches, a ragbag of different styles, and combinations of found images from television, his own snapshots etc. and quotations from art history.

Although traditional painting no longer seems central to today’s society and the mass media have become the main producers of visual images, Perramant still chooses to use painting to express his vision of contemporary visual culture. He sees painting as an essential medium and draws no distinction between film and painting: "Film-maker or painter – we see the same world, we find ourselves in the same time, in the same light. If one speaks of strategy", he says, "it is based on the fragmented perception of the everyday world. Evidently the relationship between painting and other image-related media is incontestable and yet has barely been analysed – as if there were production secrets to hide." In his eyes, the concept of ‘reality’ has become meaningless. He suggests that ‘real life’ survives only in the form of ‘loose signs’ and it is these ‘apparition’ of a fragmented reality that he depicts in a palette of dreamy pastel colours. Perrament’s challenging, ambivalent paintings bring together different images and meanings. They are frequently composed of several panels, each featuring differing motifs and together constituting exercises in observation, association and interpretation which sometimes extend over many metres. In his paintings, Perramant constantly plays with meanings, references, formal analogies and genres. He strings together words and images garnered from the street, from TV and cinema, or from art history. In the GEM, for example, he will present polyptychs combining highly finished landscapes reminiscent of the Hague School with simplified heavy-impasto images of film credits. Other paintings feature a doll-like Cat Woman, subtitled TV pictures, icon-like portraits of women, abstract explosions of colour (fireworks) or embracing couples snapped from his Montmartre studio and depicted in rock-candy colours. There are also pictures of models in his studio containing references to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Despite the visual seductiveness of his work, Perramant’s malicious mixture of subjects, colours and painting styles keeps his pictures well out of the comfort zone. The images are never easy to interpret but invariably ambivalent, constantly leaving room for new associations. An exhibition catalogue will be published. The exhibition is sponsored by Institut Francais des Pays-Bas, The Hague.

Bruno Perramant
The Garden of Delights