Robert Dufour

PETITE GALERIE DE PORTRAITS
10.06–10.30.1994

What possible interest could there be today in wanting to paint figures such as Nietzsche, Mahler, or Freud? Their photographic images have long since become almost familiar to us. Yet they continue to hold a persistent fascination for me. As we know, each of these figures laid out, in their own time and within their respective disciplines, the foundations of systems, structures, and frameworks that have since become influential schools of thought.

Intuitively, almost by chance, my work has evolved, and my thinking has been shaped by my engagement with these powerful, personal worlds. Nietzsche reinforced my desire to overturn values. Mahler’s lyrical, even romantic world prompted me to consider the notions of texture and rhythm with greater acuity and, in a different vein, to explore drama and pathos. Freud, with his etiology of neuroses, suggested to me the idea that painting, at the turn of the century, might be nothing more than the materialization of a perilous “inner conflict.”

My work—with its slow processes of elaboration, cataloging, and distribution of materials (pigments, wallpaper, fabrics, cardboard, wood, etc.), and of reevaluating the rules of representation—is, ultimately, the result of an introjection painstakingly extracted.

Every step of this process of extraction is, undeniably, colored by the ideas that these thinkers have “bequeathed” to me, in no particular order. Perhaps I should mention a few other names here: Baudelaire, Bachelard, Coltrane, Baudrillard, Mann, Bach, Fellini, Bresson, Bergman, Musil, etc. This list could go on “ad libitum,” but it would sometimes be difficult for me to assess the impact of these original “thoughts” on the way I understand and shape an image.

Ironically, will all this work of appropriation, metamorphosis, and distortion that takes place in my painting still allow the viewer the privilege of grasping the aura that seems to surround the depiction of these characters?