Born in 1946 in La Rochelle, artist and teacher, Roland Buraud lives and works in Paris. Attached to the quality of expression, he does not define himself as an “expressionist”. The historically dated character of this movement, the regular resurgence of its excessive avatars, cannot suit his silent rigor. He looks towards the Renaissance, Flanders, the Baroque. He also looks towards China, the other part of the world where his art is based.

It was on his return from his first trip in August 2004, in the company of the painter François Bossière, his friend, that he undertook this long series of “virtual” paintings, digital prints, a provisional synthesis between his work of past years, evoked here by the critic Christian Gattinoni, and the Chinese space developed by the ink painters.

He met the friendship of Masters Zeng Laide, Cheng Dali, Li Shinan and Jin Zhilin.

The gap, the great gap, between these two aesthetic conceptions, gives his work an unusual dramatic tension, a wide breathing space through the weaving of voids and fullness, of the suggested and the unsaid, while he asserts with conviction a fierce vitality that saves his “subject” from the disaster he stages.

This series must be understood in its relationship to the traditional Chinese scroll, infinite in its duration, marking the space of signs where the sensitive and continuous flow of a world apprehended by the sole process of its transformations is played out. “The One engenders the two, the Two engenders the three, the Three engenders the ten thousand beings.” Founding principle of Taoist genesis.

But its cultural anchoring in the West allows us to see this work as a song, a long chanted litany, the secret melody of a man who is still trying not to become too disenchanted with the human adventure. The epic.

R Arnold B