Stéphane Bordarier

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

Since the mid-1980s, Stéphane Bordarier (born in 1953) has been developing a body of work that belongs to this historical movement in which painting becomes its own subject. Distinctive within the landscape of contemporary art, his practice, attentive to what he calls "surface quality," rests on a balance between imposed constraints and freedom of gesture. Progressively reducing his pictorial language to the essential — a color, a form — Stéphane Bordarier explores the potentialities of a painting that is at once rigorous and deeply sensitive. His works are born of an immutable process: on a canvas stretched over a frame and coated with warm hide glue, he applies pigment during the glue's setting time. The artist describes himself as "chased away" from the canvas by the setting material, which determines the completion of the painting: color and form come into agreement in a resolution specific to each work. Generally reduced to a single tone, the surface of the canvas acquires, through the impregnation of pigment mixed with glue, a matte appearance and a particular intensity. The painting is thus built in a close relationship with time. In the Noires series, the color, resulting from a mixture of two tones directly on the canvas, never appears as a fixed or absolute value but reveals a subtle chromatic depth. These works, traversed by shifting nuances, sensitive to light and to the movement of the gaze, allow their process of creation to be perceived. For nearly thirty years, the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris accompanied and presented the work of Stéphane Bordarier. He is now represented by the Galerie Dina Vierny. Thanks to a recent acquisition supplemented by a gift from the artist, five works by Stéphane Bordarier entered the museum's collections in 2026. They are presented here alongside several loans from the studio, offering a meaningful overview of his career and his pictorial research.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗