la Grande Expo - Arts Beynost 2021

Reviews

“For twenty-five years, Jean-Marc Brugeille [sic] has been painting on canvas and making engravings in wood, (lino), copper. In these (materials), he invites birds, trees, stones, flowers and the stars into a new creation where one forgets the world of power for a life of bliss. Naked in the world, men and women believe they see. Aren’t we all criminal to not live a simple life? Such individuals are outside the story told, the story rich in (essential) symbolism and myths. In their suspended eternity, the interior scenes play on the enigma of the human soul.”

- Jacques Sordoillet

“Jean-Marc Brugeille invents an alchemy which uses logic and abstraction for familiar images, evolving like the same choice of his icons-characters, an analogy with the conception and evolution of characters in Chinese poetry; which is often a painting. The one Jean-Marc Brugeille constructs leaves an alphabet of signs spatially created from words put together in sentences or verses forming the painting, in accordance with rules of personal linguistics.

Natural languages are linear, except for Chinese writing, in two dimensions as far as written words, but still linear in their alignment. Jean-Marc Brugeille completely avoids linearity; as mathematics is successively broken by the hindrances of the impossible, it transports us into a world where freedom is not limited by the requirements of rules of equilibrium and symmetry of form and color.

His works divide themselves into cycles, his alphabet of signs and his vocabulary are continually enriched by the (chances) of his meetings, readings, his incesssant curiosity of art and poetry. Unconcerned with the resemblance of a face, it is the interior world or environment of the model that he visualizes. In this painting without perspective where (superpositions) are often represented by transparencies, cannot we see a neo-primitive directly following Italian primitives and Gaugin?”

- François Norguet, Mathematics Professor, Université Paris 7

The Art of Jean-Marc Brugeilles

Jean-Marc Brugeilles' paintings take you on a wondrous journey to an enchanted and mystical world of unmatched fine art, color, humor and beauty. Each one of his paintings is filled with vivid symbols and enduring myths and tells a different story by his use of highly personal symbolism from his childhood memories, dreams, poetry and past visual experiences. His paintings provide him with a chance to visualize and form realistic figures from his thoughts and life’s questions.

Brugeilles is a self-taught artist with an exceptionally gifted painting talent. His stunning and creative compositions are an extraordinary, vivid, visual language that taps the unconscious of the viewer and forces different ways of understanding and interpreting the world and the reality around.

His precise rendering of realistic-like objects, which hold the scene on canvas together, are intentionally positioned to upset viewers' expectations of reality and provide them with a challenge to their unconsciousness. His paintings also absorb you with his variety of beautifully drawn symbols and question your imagination into what he was thinking when he was putting oil on canvas.

Brugeilles' superbly drawn images are daring and unusual and will unlock the power of one’s imagination. They open windows with their symbolic arrangement into a strange dream-like world beyond waking life. The symbolic arrangements are not only a joy to look at, but present you with a universe that is unreal, and make you look into another world. Brugeilles has an uncanny ability to stimulate the viewer to scan multiple images among the same configuration that further probe the unconscious.

Brugeilles' astonishing usage of color is expressive, beautiful and mystical and liberates one’s mind and imaginative powers. It is the many different, vivid colors which immediately draw attention to his composition that brilliantly highlight his objects.

Brugeilles makes everything by hand, including his canvases and paint. His mastery of the demanding medieval techniques of fabricating his own gesso, constructing his own frame, stretching his own canvas, and making his own paints is unique. This method of composition and dedication to the old masters exhibits an unparalleled level of knowledge and skilled craftsmanship in his work.

A former President of France, Giscard d’Estaing, awarded Jean-Marc at the age of 17, the first prize for his region of France, the Prix du Limousin, Concours d’Affiche Nationales, Paris. This gave Brugeilles the confidence at that early age to become an artist.