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Works and lives in Paris.  

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Through the free use of silk-screen printing, painting on paper and cotton canvas, on textile and clothing scraps, Bernard Bousquet's "DIY painting" asserts itself on alternative supports. At the beginning, Bernard Bousquet began painting on coated paper and canvas, before experimenting with new supports linked to natural fibres. These experiments offer different properties that change the appearance of a painting that can freely inhabit both sides of the work, the canvas, the paper, and the textile.

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Bousquet's links with the performing arts have been present in his practice as a painter for several decades. At the end of the 1970s, Bousquet followed a course by Gina Pane in Paris, which introduced him to performance art, before taking part in one of the very first performance art symposiums in France, in Lyon. Between 1987 and 2001, Bernard Bousquet collaborated with choreographer Anne Dreyfus, for whom he produced the set and stage design. In 2006, they co-founded the Générateur in Gentilly, an artist-run space for contemporary creation, installed in a former cinema. In 2013, Bousquet transformed the Générateur into a huge studio where he unrolled the thread of his pictorial practice during residencies. He added a sound dimension to the project by teaming up with musician Jean-François Pauvros. The sound responds to the monumental paintings, to their wefts and optical vibrations. In 2017, and again in 2020 when the artist presents "Reciprocal", he surrounds himself with performers, musicians and dancers who reinvest the whole building. Huge rolls of fabric participate in a dialogue with these dance performances.

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Olivier Zeitoun 

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