MAX BUCAILLE, AN ACCOMPLISHED SURREALIST ARTIST

I don’t know who said, “Lean on principles, they’ll eventually give way”. Max Bucaille did, with all his weight, in his life as in his work. A mathematician by training, a poet in verse and image, a powerful creator with pen, brush, chisel, chisel, gouge and knife, a poet in every pore, for the last thirty years he has escaped from the most laudable and fervent definitions of his art given by his poet friends. A cosmic painter, he is so through his geological explosions, the fury of his volcanoes, the sulphurous smell of his genesis. He is a magician, bringing the mysteries of creation and the enigmas of nature within our reach. Seeker or sorcerer, he gives reality to mirages, imposing his beliefs on us. A seer, he is a seer by enlightening us with his clairvoyances. Informal painter, surrealist animist, tachist, organizer of disorder, troublemaker of nothingness, cosmonaut of dreams, animator of dead woods, priest of theunusual, he is all of these and more.

We’ll have to leave the prodigious universe of this creator here to talk only about his collages, one of the most fascinating aspects of his art, but also one of the least well known. There are three periods in his collage work. The first, from 1930 to 1940, gave birth to surrealist collages in the spirit of the 1924 manifesto. The second, from 1948 to 1960, was devoted to systematizing collages using geometric structures. Finally, the third, from 1962 to 1972, when, in his own words, he generalized the notion of collage by integrating graphic elements into gouache or, conversely, painted elements into an etching.

It is these collages that the Galerie Thérèse Roussel offers to the curiosity of visitors. They may be disconcerting, even shocking. Yet they are the result of passionate research, the culmination of the most daring techniques. Max Bucaille is undoubtedly the greatest “inventor” of collages. Above and beyond the technique, the unusual cut-outs and assemblages, the disparate, the provocative, even the uninitiated can’t help but be touched by the rigor and grandeur of this great artist’s creations.

Claude MASSE