Various medium formats
Various medium formats
The Roland Buraud collection has been under the direction and management of Etienne Buraud since 2009.
Interview
by Carlos Henderson
Carlos Henderson was born in Lima in 1940. In 1965, he traveled to Chile and Argentina. From 1969 to 1973, he lived in Mexico City. He then resided in France from 1973 to 1986. From 1986 to 1992, he returned to Peru and taught at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Since 1993, he has resided in France again, where he taught at the University of Picardie, in Amiens, from 1993 to 1997.
Interview

By Carlos Henderson, 2007
"Do you remember at the café, regarding space, the question about how your painting relates to Chinese painting?"
RB: It’s something I discovered. I wasn’t aware of it. I didn’t know. I discovered it quite recently, shortly before my first trip to China. Because I had worked—or rather seen, for "worked" is too strong a word—some painters like Zhu Da and Shi Tao, the monk Bitter Pumpkin, and this Chinese concept of space began to make its way into my thinking and intersect with my Western spatial approach. This happened as I had already moved away from practicing space as a represented or virtual space, nor did I define the space of the canvas as real space, determined by its physical dimensions. These two notions, inherited from the Renaissance and still present in figurative painting, I progressively abandoned in favor of an undefined, mental space, considering the canvas in its surface and depth as a pictorial field, an intimate site for the painter’s gesture, much like a sheet of paper is the field for writing.
Then there was, above all, the magnificent exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2003—The Sacred Mountain—and my three trips to China. Still, we are dealing with two very different plastic conceptions, evident symptoms of divergent, even opposing philosophies of life and art as symbolic representation and explanation of the world. Since the Renaissance, at least. Before that, during the Romanesque and Gothic periods, and with the early Italian primitives, frescoes and illuminations developed a layered, flat space, comparable perhaps to Asian painting, through the use of cavalier perspectives that were more or less rigorous and adapted to the needs of mural work.
CH: The Renaissance invented the window in the wall.
RB: Yes, the window, perspective—it means “to see through.” Per/spectare. I pierce the plane; I see through. Meanwhile, the Chinese, they have a different view—not piercing but rolling out—unfolding space, developing it, either from top to bottom, from the mountain’s summit to the ground under the artist’s feet (as he is always placed on a promontory somewhere midway through the depicted landscape), giving a completely different scale to the elements; or from left to right in endless horizontal scrolls, which they eventually fold into accordions, thus inventing the book.
But more than space, I believe what’s at play in this horizontality is time—because this is writing, the writing of the landscape, its calligraphy, the life in harmony with the elements, participating in the same breath, the same infinite, constant, renewed flow, albeit unfinished, that carries all things.
Vertical scrolls, on the other hand, emerge from cosmic thinking, embodying the unbreakable link between Heaven and Earth, of which we are the offspring, in the subtle interplay of emptiness and fullness, Yin and Yang, each containing the other.
CH: I recently heard a critic say there was something "Chinese" in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.
RB: At the dawn of the 16th century, we likely had little knowledge of Chinese painting... Marco Polo had returned from his 25-year journey two centuries earlier, bearing treasures and fabulous tales. Leonardo might have been aware of them—we can imagine.
But what I know, as I mentioned earlier, is that before the Renaissance, this layered space (by Leonardo’s time obsolete) was that of the early Italian primitives like Cimabue, Giotto, and later Fra Angelico, who in their frescoes or wooden panels used complex cavalier perspectives while also strongly suspecting the possibility of piercing the plane through converging vanishing lines. They became vectors of a composite cultural tradition that included an Asian influence, progressively transforming its elements toward a new art, yet inherently a product of its heritage.