This text is available in French also.

Text of Carole Boulbès in: Artpress 306, November 2004 pp. 67-68

BRUNO PERRAMANT Gemeentemuseum, la Haye

GEM, The Hague, August 28 till November 7
Mon chéri (Darling), Feedback, Au bord de I’eau (By the Waterside), Voix (Voices), Coeurs (Hearts) L’Oubli (Forgetting), Le Baiser (The Kiss), Cat woman — it very much looks like Bruno Perramant is a teller of love stories of which we get to see only the fragments on his canvases (bits of images, memories of conversations). This show at the Gemeentemuseum (near the Photomuseum) offers the first opportunity to get an overall view with one hundred fifty paintings from 1994 to the present. A unique opportunity to see where his world is made of. Clearly, he borrows freely from such sources as Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights, traditional Chinese and Christian iconography, erotic imagery, superheroes and Heideggerian philosophy.

No less. Perramant is a serious painter What he gives us is not some ironic and self-destructing puzzle that shifts from one quote the next (think Martin Kippenberger or Jim Shaw). Working from photographs (of models like Lorraine and Patricia) or captures from TV, he proceeds by projection and the association of ideas, drawing on a repertoire of familiar signs. While running the risk of losing the viewer in this hotchpotch of personal allusions, his painting seems to develop in a succession of movements. The emphasis is on the details that often recur from one painting to the next. Invoking the “principle of delights,” Perramant invites us to share in a kind of pictorial pleasure which he tries to make dense and engrossing. Hence the tightly-packed canvases at this show. At the same time, you could say that the artist’s pictorial explorations borrow from the logic of dreams: associations of ideas, condensation and displacement are a key part of their grammar.

The Hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Delights polyptych is full of gryllos and fantastical monsters that the Surrealists compared to the products of oneirc association. But of course, Bosch’s assemblage of elements taken from the vegetable and animal kingdoms had a religious function; it was there to frighten miscreants. Perramant’s works flirt with these aspects, which they continually condense and displace. Between the Fall and Hell, they give form to the old fantasy of the holy woman, both prostitute and mother: the Demoiselles (no. 4, 2002), who pose elegantly in black underwear, were conceived as a sequel to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. As for Lorraine (no. 8, 2003), she is squatting to give birth, a Chinese dragon emerging from her vagina as she loses her viscera. Woman is at once delicious and monstrous. She engenders chaos: “chaos, that is to say, nothing, between the spread legs of a woman” (says Perramant in the exhibition catalogue).

The Archangel Gabriel (he of the Annunciation) is more fortunate, Ho mutates into Leirbag (Gabriel spelt backwards) and engages in various forms of erotic disport with his Demoiselles. Through figures such as Leirbag, Fausto, Spider Man and Lorraine, and in some of the polyptychs, notably the ones with six paintings forming a horizontal cross (Les Portes no. 1, 2000; Les Portes no. 2, 2003), the painter seems to be questioning the mystery of his own creation.

In the big recent works (the triptych Où est notre coeur? (Where is Our Heart?) and the diptych Au bord de I’eau, we see signs of a promising direction. The captions that appear below the paintings, rather like subtitling on a film, are repeated in huge bold characters that seem to invade the surface of the painting. If the scripto-iconic message is simple — Au bord d l’eau really does represent water at night — the signified still obstinately refuses to be tamed. These polyptychs open up the delicious world of repetition and duplication.


Carole Boulbès
Translation, C. Penwarden