"Bernard Garo's preoccupations were initially focused on the topographies of passage and oblivion, the forces of the elements, natural and artificial boundaries, time and the geological histories of the mountains. More recently, erosion has crept into his work, followed quite naturally by the water and carbon cycle and the shrinking of glaciers linked to the acceleration of global warming.

To develop this approach, the artist favours an entirely natural materialist approach by introducing contextualised materials into his canvases, taken directly from nature, which sets him apart from other artists in the same family. Thanks to this pictorial 'skin' that uses the materials of our origins, his painting becomes a memory, a reality, well beyond any image; a surface, a vibration, a structure with colours, carrying an emotional energy, considering emotion to be the highest of artistic values, since it unites all the arts indiscriminately.

In this way, he transposes into his work what he is most sensitive to: "The Great Outdoors". It's a non-human or non-human environment, set in a long geological timeframe, since it takes into account the whole of reality, including the past and the future, rocks, magma, ice, water and micro-organisms, right down to the atoms that now play the role of symbolic interlocutors and form the plane on which his works unfold.

We are faced with a universe that is inhuman in the face of the climate tragedy that is about to unfold. He no longer represents the human individual in his works; he leaves him outside, either as a spectator, a powerless witness to the predicted disaster of the melting glaciers, and both culprit and victim at the same time of the self-destruction of his own habitat.

Faced with this reality, Garo has been probing the fragile memory of our humanity for over two decades, mainly through painting, but also through installations, sculptures, drawings, not forgetting photography, video and performance art, measuring the impact and vulnerability of human beings in the face of their environment.

In his constant quest for the absolute and for evolution beyond the visible and the present, the artist freely borrows the vocabulary of art to create space, in order to expand our vision of the world to the extreme points of human experience: the gigantic or the minuscule, from glacier to rock dust.

As in performance with the interdisciplinary collective La Dernière Tangente (founded in 1999 with musician Éric Fischer and actor François Chattot), or in video with the collective Black Shroud (founded in 2022 with filmmaker Marc Décosterd), Garo creates original short films and 4-hand art videos that place paint and matter at the centre of visual emotion, like a signature, in order to preserve a link with the tangible, the concrete, plasticity and a physical truth that brings us back to the memory and awareness of a whole. "     Joan Francesc Ainaud