By Christian Gattinoni, October 2002

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The bodies in Roland Buraud's paintings have the weight of shrouds suspended over a dark monochromatic background. Each large-format canvas is crossed by such a corporeal presence, occupying the broadest center of the painting. Each figure is positioned as if in a modern descent from the cross.

However, the spirituality that permeates the work is distinctly secular. There is no hope of an afterlife here, only the absolute presence of life in its impossibility. If a literary universe finds expression here, it is Beckett’s. We are in the "Endgame" of a tragedy that is inherently individual. The dialogue of presences is reduced to its simplest expression, disappearing slowly and fusionally. An arched body in solitude converses, in the inversion of forms, only with its cast shadow, which seems to independently assume its carnal potential.

Other fragmented bodies lean forward in crosses, bowing and breaking over the central figures. Their overall arc-like motion seems to manifest physical empathy. They exist wholly in this gesture that curves them toward the large, stretched body, lying as if in repose. The drafts of faces are scraped away by painted lines that give them a ghostly presence. The central body asserts a masculine identity, while the smaller forms that crucify them with their consoling presence retain remnants of femininity. These are not mourners—impossible in this atmosphere of profound silence—but lamenters.

The flat, dark spaces of the backgrounds materialize a silent abyss that commands respect or dread from the viewer. The towering stature of the canvases, the near-equal scale of the central figure to that of the observer's body, keeps the viewer at a respectful distance. The impression of violating a painful intimacy justifies the dread. The combination of both respect and fear provokes a true fascination that questions each of us about aging, the end of life, the necessary tenderness of bodies, and the irrepressible drive that compels one body toward another—for no addition of soul but for skin-to-skin contact, shroud-to-shroud.

The painting carries an epidermal fragility, trembling with these lingering presences. The interweaving of bodies that haunt the later seasons of life attempts this relentless compassion, as if in a last-chance therapy—the therapy of a project that creates art from the subtle variations of these human situations fraught with extreme tension. At the twilight of bodies.

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