Words, lines, and steps,
three words, three “totems” to define Pierre Bourrigault’s work.
First and foremost, the words that imbue the artist, a great reader of Georges Pérec and Gaston Bachelard. In them, he finds the freedom to dire and the freedom to comment dire.
The lines are horizons, outlines of the shores we’ve crossed, from the Atlantic coast in Brittany to the Venetian lagoon to the acidic seashores of Miami. Each geography has its chromatic tonality.
Finally, steps, thousands of them. Pierre Bourrigault is a walking artist, in the vein of the term coined for artist Hamish Fulton in the 70s, who said, “Without walking, there is no work.” Fulton doesn’t act on the landscape like Land Art artists but transcribes it into a work of art when he returns from his walks, a posteriori. He evokes the “transformative” potential of walking, which, through the experience of the route covered, “optimizes perception and receptivity to the landscape.”
Pierre Bourrigault is a daily walker and enjoys long summer hikes along the coast. During these escapades, he observes and photographs. Back in his studio, he reviews his images and, like an architect, draws the structuring lines of force of the landscape scenes he wishes to bring to life, prints a photographic grid, and then continues by hand with colored pencils.
The reality of the image fades into poetic horizons, sometimes featuring strange animals and incongruous, dreamlike elements.
A hybrid between photography and drawing, reality and imagination, body and mind.
A With his attention to nature, Pierre Bourrigault contributes to making the Washi paper on which he designs his works. In the Veneto region of Italy, following a tradition dating back to 6th-century Japan and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, he produces a paper made entirely by hand from mulberry fibers, with no ecological impact.
Originally from Brittany, Pierre Bourrigault attended the Studio Berçot, a fashion school in Paris. He now devotes himself to illustration and 2D animation.
