Jean-Pierre BISSONNIER

Jean-Pierre Bissonnier does not believe in gifts, dictators of our ego, but rather more nobly in

inspiration; in the artist’s capacity to allow it to carry and infuse within the artist so that it can

be changed. He lives in a location where his horizon is blocked by mountains. A bit too much, perhaps. According to him, every man who is open to the world is creative.

In fact, this overture, depth of perception can be felt in his work.
 

Jean-Pierre Bissonnier was born on January 29, 1954, in Paris. After his studies divided

between Applied Arts and photography, he became a graphic artist specialized in multimedia events. Five years ago, he left the Paris region for Die, a city of artists where his son lives. The relocation and contact makes him realize that he "has the right to exist as an artist." His midlife crisis is quite unusual because it brings him back to art.
 

A visionary like Hugo, his staggering inks, where he expresses his taste for and sense of

purity, strip the landscape, retaining only water – the water of a diamond. They are inspired by Michaux’ tachisme (Oise) splattered with pure gold (Fleuve noir). To understand his work,

imagine a meeting between Harpignies and Soulages, or Mallarmé united with Céline.

Brown and black shades dominate his abstract inks in order to reach the distant backwash. To express a worry that is soothing in the end. A pond, lake or river appears as an etching Hades, welcoming on the horizon of life.
 

Humanistic caricaturist, smile-seeker rather than frowns, when he (re)creates unusual objects such as Miss Cadonett, a mystical creature that was saved from the Drôme, he has the ability of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

During his strolls along the Drôme river, he chose to "save" (meaning recycle) objects on

which he changes little but with just enough humor to make us like them again. His

environmental awareness as well as his curiosity drives him to consider the reasonable world as a possible recreation, like an artistic recreation.
 

He says that he is obsessed by water and its reflections. A healthy obsession that is reflected in his inks. He is careful not to allow any reflection in his work be unthinkingly a copy,

mechanically symmetrical. His reflections are also recreations.

The gracefulness of Italian schools, such as da Vinci or Botticelli, resounds in his soft and

luminous figurative inks. They are not pastiches but rather sketches of imaginary sculptures.

Jean-Pierre describes his work like a "sculptor turning around his subject, looking for volume."
 

Refusing to bow to a measure of market value – the weighing of souls in ancient Egypt makes just as much sense to him – wholesale art that puts a price on height and weight, he usually works on small and medium sizes to better capture the intimacy of a subject. Although he intends to explore more ample gestures in the near future.
 

Finally, he is the father of Sylvain Bissonnier. However, at first glance, their work, subjects

and expressions are very different and only the name seems to be a common link.
 

They share a high opinion of art and arts in the plural, the taste for driftwood, constantly

renewed. Neither one is well behaved. One explodes a body with gouache, pulled on a cord.

The other strips a landscape of all that is pretty. The strength of one reveals the intensity of the other. The father’s delicate poetry and ascetics, the son’s imagination and artistic tumult. At their contact, contemplation becomes a fever; the nature of art becomes a familiar sonata with airs of Beethoven. A more rock’n roll Arvo Pärt.

Texts © Elise Walter - Galerie d'art WE ART TOGETHER
Black and white photograph ©  Jean-Pierre Bissonnier