In 2001, I saw Roland tackle a new project, as always in a somewhat frantic way. The word is not right. Let's say obsessive. I never saw him not complete an idea. He had this conviction of research that gives the energy to always go all the way, and without any particular energy, moreover. I saw him reworking from scraps of canvas, unfinished pieces, excessive second thoughts. He cuts, he assembles, he glues, and this in a format that I had never seen him explore. These are small formats, very small, sixteen centimeters by twenty-two. At the same time, in the studio, there is a series of large diptychs begun in 1998 (www.rolandburaud.fr/peintures/1998-2002.html), monumental two meters by three, on a quasi-monochrome background, thus working simultaneously in two antagonistic formats.

In 2005, during the year of France in China, Tianjin offered a free format for donations to Chinese boxes. This encouraged dispersion and acquisition in the form of free composition (see right page). Very quickly, between the gifts and the acquisitions, there were only eighty left when François Bossière brought them back from China after they had been carefully stored there. He told me that this series had been started following the attacks of September 11, 2001. I thought back to those images of bodies falling from the top of the Twin Towers.

The anecdote that the painter François Bossière learns is more than plausible even if I had never heard it from the painter himself. Great historical tragedies have always smiled, even triggered, under a work, and under this series. In 1973, Roland Buraud painted the Palaciacos, representing the bodies impaled in the stadium of Santiago de Chile after the coup d'état of... September 11.