The Continuity of Confidence
Essay by Robert JohnsonThere is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
- Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Beauty,” Essays (1625)
I want my paintings to be inaccurate and anomalous in such a way that they become lies, if you like, but lies that are more truthful than the literal truth.
-Vincent Van Gogh, Letters
The artistic journey of Pierre Marie Brisson started out with an abundance of raw talent and a stubborn sense of determination thirty-two years ago. In mounting his first exhibition, at his own expense, in his hometown of 
Portrait
1978It is not enough to make a wine; you must also have others willing to eagerly drink it. Brisson, like many creative artists, was blessed in his early years by having his art intoxicate the minds of experienced and thoughtful collectors and dealers who saw great promise in his present and future. Brisson’s early work displayed vibrant surface gesture and form that traced its roots back to the stained glass fragmentation of Georges Rouault, the playful imagery of Paul Klee, and the automatism of Pierre Courtin, Bram Van Velde, and the Cobra group that included Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, and Pierre Alechinsky.
This is where his art began but not where it was to evolve to in his maturity. It is clear that Pierre Marie Brisson is a representational artist. Like Picasso and Miró before him, Brisson’s imagery can stray far afield, often bordering on abstraction. However, images of reality, even shattered shards of experience, are always present in his work. Brisson spoke of this:
A form always comes from something. You can never deny the existence of figurative art. That is something very important because it is very difficult to think abstractly without looking at the angle of a house, a landscape, the sea, a desert. It’s important.
The form . . . I have worked on human figures. They remain human figures while being expressed in the simplest way possible, with the richest interpretation of movement. But sometimes these human figures become something else, allowing everyone to make his own interpretation.
It is clear that the human form is the dominating and most reoccurring subject in his art. Brisson further elaborated:
In my paintings the most important [element] is the human figure or what remains of the figure because it can become something else. The starting point is the human being. It recurs all [of the] time and from this starting point, it becomes signs, it becomes something else. It can be blended with other signs or singled out. It can be just a line, but it always remains a human being.
Someone once said that art is not a form of communication but a vehicle for sharing experience between artist and viewer. The art of Pierre Marie Brisson fits this description. It is rich with layers of artistic expression capable of unlocking repressed or forgotten levels of memory in individuals.
Portrait de Profil
1981Brisson combines various elements of life, which we have all observed at different times and places. Yet, except through his art, never before have they been experienced at a single time and place. These elements may include the rough surface of an ancient wall, the craquelure of old paint, the decorative pattern of wallpaper and woven fabric, and the minimal shorthand figuration done either through the assurance of artistic sophistication or the inherent practice of archaic beliefs. Brisson’s art is very chic and new, yet timeworn and antique. It is avant-garde and ingenious, yet linked visually and spiritually to primitive sensibilities. Finally, it is skillfully crafted with the best materials, yet part of its success rests with the sense that his works are fashioned from the ugly, discarded fragments of our disposable civilization, renewed and revitalized by the hand of the artist. Pierre Marie Brisson creates an art that invites--no, demands--repeated viewing over time. His paintings, drawings, and prints, like the best of poetry, cinema, and fine art, ask more questions than they answer.
Art is continuity: it goes forward yet ever looks backward. 
Revelation III
1995Pierre Marie Brisson is not one to obscure his sources of inspiration. His artistic roots are buried deep in the soil of his native 
Revelation V
1995Brisson slips comprehensible though often cropped or obscured images in and out of our recognition. He does this while always maintaining the sense of a unified composition. The resulting surfaces and subjects captivate and recall Satayana’s dictum that sensations are rapid dreams.
Brisson’s mature style can be linked to French art in the post-war years. In the 1940s and early ‘50s, Jacques Villegle and Raymond Hains transformed the look of layers of torn and discarded posters from the streets of
Jean Dubuffet, in his dark, thickly impastoed paintings of the 1940s and ‘50s, is an even stronger link to the spirit that Brisson displays in his work. Dubuffet believed in art but not in beauty. He wanted his works to challenge rather than seduce. Dubuffet wrote:
I believe beauty is nowhere. I consider the usual notion of beauty to be completely false - I refuse absolutely to assent to this idea, that there are ugly persons and ugly objects. This idea is stifling and revolting to me. I think the Greeks are the ones who were first to purport this invention - that certain objects are more beautiful than others. The so-called savage peoples do not believe in that conception at all and they do not understand when you speak to them of beauty. It is strange that for centuries and centuries, and now more than ever, the men of the Occident dispute which things are beautiful and which are ugly. All are certain that beauty exists without doubt, but one cannot find two who agree about the objects which are so endowed. And from one century to the next it changes. In each century Occidental culture declares beautiful what it declared ugly in the preceding one.
I am certain that if he were alive, Jean Dubuffet would have embraced and encouraged the art of Pierre Marie Brisson. He would have recognized that the same people who failed to appreciate the qualities of his own art would be equally baffled by those of Brisson. It is the sense that when Brisson finishes a painting, it is brand new yet at the same time contains the patina of wear and the appearance of something that has existed for ages. For those who understand his art, the distressed surface of Brisson’s works is the alchemy that makes them a success; what would appear ugly in another artist’s work is exactly what makes Brisson’s art memorable.
If anything ever does work in my case it works from that moment when consciously I didn't know what I was doing . . . It's really a question in my case of being able to catch the fact at its most living point.
Francis Bacon, 1968
To better understand his art, it is informative to have Brisson explain his working method:
Usually, I start with some small sketches. Then I do several small paintings on paper, then I go to the work itself. When I have discovered through these various steps what I want to do, the final work must be executed very quickly. It’s as if I memorized a piece of music. You memorize your page and when you have to perform it you must not make any mistakes. I must create the work very fast on the large canvas in order to give it life. And the larger the canvas, the more life it must have. Each time you must feel something while working with the medium. It’s not light. You must scratch it; you must be a little violent and then give sureness to the line.
An early painting, Portrait (1978), is a work that has a dark raw intensity about it. Only the surface energy of linear strokes reminds one of where Brisson’s work would develop in the coming years.
Africa
1986
In the early 1980s, Brisson developed a new way of creating his surface through subtraction rather than addition that was to become a trademark of his style. In a painting such as Portrait de Profile (1981) there is a sense of scrubbing down the surface to create a beautifully timeworn background for his elegantly abstracted profile of a head.
Brisson displayed his subtle playfulness in
By the beginning of the 1990s, Brisson was using the method of radically building up the surfaces of his works to emphasize tangible tactility. The artist explained the originality of this technique:
There is always earth, stone, the actual stuff of the picture. It is always present. And it’s important because it brings you back to your roots. It’s a mixture of what I call “une petite cuisine.” That is to say a mixture of all kinds of very durable materials . . . many kinds of glues and sand called silicium. It is used to make glass and it mixes very well with glue to give this sandy look of stone and after all that I use oil paints. I start by creating the texture on canvas; it is the foundation, afterwards, I create the accident, in other words, I give relief to this texture by adding some cuts.
The success of this technique is seen in such series as Botanique I-IV (1994), Revelation I-III, V (1995) and Fragment I-IV (1995), where Brisson orchestrates the violence of his working method into a balanced harmony of form, color, and texture.
Suspension
1995
Recently, I encountered the famous photograph, Liberia (1931), by Martin Munkacsi. I had known the image for years without paying much attention to it. 
L'envolee
1995But now as I stared at it I was wondering why it had suddenly attracted my attention . . . and then I realized, to my surprise, that what it had triggered in my subconscious was linked to the imagery of Pierre Marie Brisson’s lyrical depiction of humans. Munkacsi’s children, with arms and legs in motion, darting into the waves, were like Brisson’s elongated forms in many works including L’envolée (1995) and Suspension (1995).
One cannot help but admire the audaciousness of Pierre Marie Brisson in the way he challenges his subject matter. In Attitude (2002), the reality of a standing figure is evident, but the lack of arms and the cropping at the shoulders create a form that also functions as segments of black, red, and yellow that complement the background traces of blue and white.
Color is an important element in Brisson’s art but one that the artist employs with a judicious restraint, as he explained:
It's important without appearing to be so. It must be accidental. It must appear on a surface as though it had been created by time. Take a young tree, for example. Little by little its bark grows, and creates various tones. Then lichen appears, and gives the tree a different aspect. With time it will become a beautiful tree. A young tree is perhaps less interesting. Color is a little like that. You mustn't put color on a canvas just to put color; you must put color only when it is necessary.
This assured subtlety of application is evident in works such as Parcelle II (2006), where the green of the stems is restrained in comparison to the blue of the buds whose tone delicately dominates the work’s surface.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you in the recent painting Projection V (2007). Yes, Brisson has elegantly referenced the figure of Adam from Michelangelo’s fresco for the Sistine Chapel in the outstretched arm of his model. Brisson’s art lives with a relaxed confidence that easily takes inspiration from the past as he constantly pushes his art ever forward.
Anyone can have talent when he is five-and-twenty; it is more difficult to have talent when you are fifty.
Edgar Degas
Loyalty is spelled with a small “l” in the world of contemporary art today. Artists whose fledgling careers had been nurtured and expanded by dealers for years are precipitously wooed away by more moneyed and powerful galleries when success begins to arrive, often with not so much as a “thank you” as they depart. In turn, dealers who are always on the lookout for the next art-world star are justifiably accused of losing confidence in promising artists if their work does not attract immediate public recognition and sustained sales. The art world, whose product is beauty and intellect, is often conducted in an atmosphere of overstatement and distrust. One hundred years ago, Edgar Degas could have been commenting on the present situation when he said that there are certain types of success that are indistinguishable from panic.
It is, therefore, important to recognize and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Pierre Marie Brisson with Franklin Bowles Galleries. Theirs has been an association of admirable mutual confidence and trust over the years. For Pierre Marie, it was to devote himself to his art with creativity, vigor, and enterprise; and for Frank, to promote and present Pierre Marie’s art with diligence and dignity. Two decades in the history of art is but a moment, but in the life of an artist, it represents a large portion of his or her career. The delight of observing an artist like Pierre Marie Brisson in mid-career is to savor, as we do now, that which he has created and to eagerly anticipate what is to come.
Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts