PAINTINGS
"At the base of his work, the artist begins by exploring reality, in journeys that take him in the whole world...from Beijing to New York, without forgetting South Africa to Siberia.. His sensitive gaze rests on the particular details that he collects with photos, and in which he stores impressions of atmospheres, particular kinds of light, architectural structures typical of each place. Like an alchemist, an archaeologist or a geologist, after a sketch that already reveals the ideal dimensions of the final canvas, he takes off right away in search of pictorial materials. The constants are a background colour and the use of bitumen whose black shade, and oily, thick matter confer on his canvases an astonishing depth. The gesture of the mason with his trowel, or the sower with his sieve has a prominent importance in the work of Bernard Garo. He plumbs his source through a kind of ritual, whereby one freely imagines the painter becoming one with the canvas and the material" Nicole Kunz
"Bernard Garo’s painted work explores the concept of boundaries and our identity at the heart of nature. Raw materials – volcanic sands, marine sediments, bitumen of Judea, asphalt, latex, rockdust, soils and natural pigments–are joined on the canvas to build monumental compositions."