Ceysson & Bénétière

Robert Brandy and the Art of Painting

The study Bernard Noël dedicated to Robert Brandy's work is entitled "Le Roman du geste," a novel that narrates and stages the painter in his studio, unveiling the creation and production of his painting, and analyzing its origin in what he called "his gestural flowering." An original conception of time is distilled, not linear or even cyclical, but understood as a succession and simultaneity of moments. It is these moments precisely that become events, condensed time of a pictorial moment, leaving its trace on the work, of which it is the paradoxical memory and sedimentation.

According to Robert Brandy, the moment condenses the here and now, time and space, the entire framework and dramaturgy inherent in the realization of the work. It is the propitious opportunity of the gesture, the perfect commission of what Jean Clair opposes to chance, to quote him: the irruption and use of "kairos," of good omen. The "kairos," he explains, "is the decisive moment that breaks the sequential and logical unfolding of things, that cuts into the rhetoric of the world, the sort of break-in or coup that allows one to intervene at the right moment to disrupt its course (...) It thus connects a singular apprehension of scale and a particular grasp of time." 

It's the right opportunity for "technè," the art of painting, involving the revelation of an atmosphere, a tuning fork, and, according to his definition, of a mood, a "fundamental affective and emotional disposition," as evidenced, as evidenced by the frequent inscriptions and brackets on the canvases, akin to cartridges and phylacteries.

There is also the legacy of Supports/Surfaces, an exploration of the materiality of supports, frames, and stretchers, of the realistic effects achieved through collage, grafting of objects, or movable wood pieces. This culminates in the works Installations, Boîtes and Ensembles intégrés, in the exchange between what is intrinsic and extrinsic to the composition space. There is an interest in post-war American painters, ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Philip Guston.

On one hand, there is the geometric, architectural rigor of the large white paintings entitled Existences, from 1978-1981, and on the other, the abstract expressionism of the latest ink papers and canvases from 2022-2023, evocative of Pierre Soulages' "beyond black." Each time, it is about capturing light and reflecting it, somehow irradiating it, subtle and transparent like the air circulating between the pieces of the Boîtes series. But, in the realm of abstract painting, there is more still. 

"I create from landscapes," says Robert Brandy. How should we understand this? Does it mean that abstraction is merely repressed figuration, a withdrawal from the figurative, concealment of the reference? Maurice Merleau-Ponty could shed light on the matter. "The landscape," he writes, "is thought through me, and I am its consciousness." Intentionality is not naturalistic. It is figural, and it tends more towards making painting its own landscape, revealing its fundamental note and quiddity. What can its quiddity be, if not its color? It is the experience Hélène Berr has when, looking at the world upside down, she discovers "the marvelous chromatic harmony of the landscape," when she has the supreme intuition that, of all colors, the green of fresh grass is the only vibrant one.

In Robert Brandy's work, it manifests on one hand through the emotive gestural expression, and on the other, through a passion for colors, where the abstract and the concrete coincide in a single palpitation. Gilles Deleuze draws attention to this statement by Cézanne: "I would like (...) to paint space and time so that they become forms of chromatic sensitivity." This reversal of sensations contains all the elements of the equation that summarize Robert Brandy's art: the moment of "kairos," the phenomenology of perception, the experiments on material, the gestural approach, the memorial advent of landscape abstraction, color as the essence of seeing.

Let's leave the final words to Cézanne: "A keen sense of shades is working inside me. I feel colored by all the shades of infinity. At that moment, I become one with my painting." This consubstantiality, reminiscent of Montaigne speaking of his Essays, is what Robert Brandy aims for and reenacts from one canvas to another. And it is no small feat.

April 2023, Jean Sorrente

Ceysson & Bénétière