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PAINTING, DRAWING AND WASH
(MATERIALS, PRINTS AND INKS)

"Bernard Garo's painting work questions the concept of borders and our identity in the heart of nature. Raw, raw materials – volcanic sands, marine sediments, Judean bitumen, asphalt, latex, stone powders, earth and pigments natural – come together on the canvas to structure monumental compositions." As also inks, natural pigments and walnut hulls diluted with water from glaciers, lakes or oceans on Chinese papers, pure cotton vellum papers or other innovative supports.

"At the basis of his work, in a quest for knowledge, the artist begins by exploring reality and unknown territories, through travels that take him all over the world; from Alexandria to Reykjavík, from Lisbon to Istanbul, as also from Barcelona to Berlin or from Beijing to New York, without forgetting from South Africa to Siberia in order to create bridges between cultures. His sensitive eye focuses on particular details that he collects by photographing them and of which he retains impressions of atmospheres, of particular lights, of architectural structures specific to each place, revealing the invisible and elusive face of our land and our culture, that in perpetual evolution. Like an alchemist, an archaeologist or a geologist, he then launches, after a sketch which will already reveal to him the ideal dimension of the final canvas, in the search for pictorial materials. The constants are a background color and the use of bitumen including the tone of black and the material oily and thick gives his paintings a timelessness and astonishing depth. The gesture of the mason with his trowel or the sower with his sieve has a preponderant importance in the artist's work. It draws its source from a sort of ritual where we readily imagine the painter becoming one with the canvas and the material." to recreate a new link to the world. Nicole Kunz (Director of an Art Center, historian and art critic)

Committed artist, noting that 25,000 years ago the entire territory of Switzerland was covered by more than 1000 meters of ice and that today, if nothing changes, in less than 100 years, 50,000 years memory frozen in ice, will disappear due to the accelerated melting of glaciers linked to climate change caused in part by human pollution.
“Garo shows us the urgency of safeguarding the earth and its biodiversity - humanity included - through his equivocal and emotional immersive artistic acts which open up reflection and universal awareness.  He thus develops an artistic thought on the ambivalent relationship of man with his environment, on human memory and its vulnerability.

It is the story of an artistic commitment that has not finished being written as the climate and social emergency is shaking our entire planet!

Hervé Groscarret (Head of the Publics and Exhibitions Unit at the Geneva Natural History Museum)

 

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