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On My Friend Roland Buraud
By François Bossière

For nearly 15 years, Roland Buraud has been my trusted companion. Last summer, he discovered China by accompanying me to Beijing and Shaanxi. Together, we met Zeng Laide, Fan Di’an, Jin Zhilin, Cheng Dali, He Dan, and many other artists who warmly welcomed his work and reflections on art. In April, he made a special trip to Beijing for my exhibition at the Today Art Gallery. In the sweltering August heat, we are now both invited to participate in the “French Charm Week” in Tianjin. This will be Roland’s first time showcasing his paintings to Chinese artists and friends.

Roland Buraud dives into deep waters, unsettling the gaze because, at such depths, transparency returns. It’s like remembering that at the bottom of great oceanic trenches, there are places where magma flows freely, warming the invisible and what we thought unlivable. His work takes on the color of ash, still layered and embedded with a few unburnable primary hues. Then, avoiding the temptation to blow it all away, he nurtures it, thickens it, and rounds it. After giving all its heat, the wood begins to animate and floats back to the surface.

He sometimes paints very small formats, a reminder that if he paints large, it’s by choice and not constraint. Most of his work is monumental, offering enough depth for viewers to dive into it life-size. They may not be inclined to, but the vastness he presents compels them to confront the invitation. His expansive, golden surfaces brim with the ink he has poured into them.

Roland depicts the human body in a state of exhaustion, caught between two forms of life. Yes, his bodies seem a little smudged, as if they’d consumed white square on white background or Duchamp’s bottle rack—chalky or greasy, tired (but not empty) from centuries of conflicting theories. They lie like logs, ready to take root, and that can lead somewhere profound.

It’s primarily the body of painting itself that he pushes to its limits, yet it endures and lives on. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that painting isn’t over—it’s just beginning. Of course, it pauses occasionally, as it did in Holland between Vermeer and Van Gogh, or in Italy between Canaletto and Morandi. But to say painting has just begun is a cumbersome idea, like the ashen, sticky masses that are too heavy to sweep away. And Roland, year after year, quietly insists, driving the point home without faltering.

He dedicates himself to the essentials: oil painting in all its vitality, exploring its thousand textures—rough or smooth, shiny or matte, pooled or threaded. He meticulously prepares his backgrounds, whose darkness contains a hidden luminosity, embodying depth and the weight of memory. Yet he paints the bodies in only five or six sessions—speed is a necessity for him.

In the past, he produced thousands of drawings during work sessions with a dancer and choreographer friend. His diligence and patience enabled him to internalize every posture of the human body, building a repertoire he uses like a calligrapher employs Chinese ideograms. He often returns to consult Rembrandt in Amsterdam, Rubens in Antwerp, and the café terrace across the street. Then he layers more paint over a few extra square meters, adjusting the tilt, fold, or arch of his figures. His flesh-like paintings sprawl effortlessly, anchored firmly to their structure and given time to breathe.

Rooted in a sense of tragedy that is distinctly Western, Roland Buraud’s practice resonates with Chinese concerns. His recent discovery of China has deepened his exploration of the interplay between emptiness and fullness, transparency and opacity, fluidity and density. His forms are beginning to dissolve; his bodies resemble mountains, rocks, or tree stumps, evoking a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm. They present themselves as landscapes, painted in a single gesture, in perpetual transformation.

 

To sustain this pictorial vitality, one can find a collection of Chinese theoretical texts on painting near his easel and, behind him, dozens of carefully arranged Chinese brushes hanging on the walls.

François Bossière
July 2005, Paris

Painting the body with oil paint

(about my friend Roland Buraud)

by François Bossière

François Bossière is a visual artist. A great friend of the painter Roland Buraud, he exhibited with him during the year of France in China at the Tianjin Museum in 2005.

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©2025 by Etienne Buraud

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