Julie Bessard : Painting, tracing, weaving the line in space

With the imperative force of flashes and lightning bolts, Julie Bessard’s paintings are experienced from the outset as hypnotic, contradictory, and elusive spaces. They propose simultaneously the opaque and powerful black of their background, which defines their identity as paintings – that is, as circumscribed spaces –, and the gestural force of the coloured spurts that cross them, virtually spraying the usual visual parameters that limit the image in its flatness. The bright tones of the linear colour forms radicalize a simple chromatic equation and define space while enhancing the unchanging depth of black. Her choice of pastel oil chalks has allowed the artist a sought-after speed of execution that emphasizes the movement while introducing the sensation of a materiality that marks the black background without breaking into it. Indeed she speaks of “something that rises, that breaks away” as opposed to an incisive element, that would break into the (virtual) depth of the painting. These bright lines of colour, both fluid and strong, are not drawn at random. The coherence of the picture is built gradually, in a spontaneous coordination of gesture and time.
Sometimes, however, these sinewy flashes of bright colours” are somewhat caught up in the deep black. The fight is then open to tornadoes, twists, and scars in the painting field.. It is from these tormented paintings that the virtual flights of material woven linear forms unfold in space like great fishing nets thus connecting, literally or metaphorically, the painted fields to the outer space, without actually embroiling them into it. The link between pictorial space and real space, between volume and flatness, materializes through them. This elaborate though subtle dynamic tension between the deep black field and the vigor of colour forms, and through the deployment of linear graphics in space, the works of Julie Bessard propose a form of «mega-pictorial seismographic adventure» that brings to mind a gest of American Action Painting, while the fine lines of the drawings on white paper that create a live dialogue with them, display a delicacy of signs and traces closer to the works of Europeans such as Henri Michaux or Hans Hartung. These “wall” drawings form a “subtle counterpoint to the paintings while suggesting their quintessence,” explains the artist. This is strong work, both global and open. It offers a rewarding and subtle adventure into the yet to be wholly discovered infinite world of sensitivity.

Ann Hindry,
Paris, July 2019

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