Why teacher?

Roland Buraud's studio is located in the heart of Paris between Bastille and Gare de Lyon. The landscape seen from the window could be a photo by Robert Doisneau, charged with the moods of everyday life: the street corner, the terrace, the play of light and shadow on the facade... Inside the studio, solitude interrupts the continuity of time and space. The material only appears on the paintings.

Roland was born in 1946. His age is not revealed to categorize him in this or that artistic movement (this method of classifying artists has become so vulgar, even disgusting), nor to indicate the experience accumulated over the years, but to present the wisdom, humor, tolerance and humility engraved by time on an artist who never stops thinking. He is an art teacher at the college. His social activities are extremely simple.

Why a teacher? Because it is not easy to earn a living for a professional artist, especially for one who does not know how or does not want to frequent galleries and the media. Today, the word "professional" is becoming a bit subtle. It means more being able to enter a network of relationships, sell one's merchandise, than having a talent, a superior understanding respected by one's peers. In view of the first criterion, Roland is not very professional. He even had a ten-year slump that began with his divorce. He left his house and jumped into his car with a suitcase, heading for Paris where a friend welcomed him. But he had lost his studio as well as the will to pick up his brushes again.

How to continue to paint the human body that still fascinates him? More than a technical problem, a fundamental question arises: why continue to paint? What possibilities could one achieve by persisting? In the 80s, France succumbed to conceptual art, installation, performance, video... Easel painting found itself "outdated". During these ten years, he dabbled a little in photography; however, as soon as he had a new studio, he hardly hesitated to take up the easel again. More than a simple return, it was a return to the origins, with drawing from a live model. At that time, he had a friend who was a dancer and choreographer; he drew in her class almost daily. I then realized that his plastic skill is the fruit of these exercises and not of his academic training. We can guess that Roland was a student during the events of 1968.

At that time, revolutionary ideas were jostling in people's heads: the deconstruction of knowledge and power, irony on utilitarianism, psychoanalysis on the mental structure of man... Obviously, the schools of Fine Arts were at the forefront. They talked about perhaps everything except painting.

He left his brushes for ten years, but this silence seems stronger and more touching than a relentless productivity. He modestly made a great detour, necessary to find his starting point. Like a long and mystical baptism, he finally integrated himself into the most dynamic spiritual lineage of Western painting to which Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon belong.

One is an artist only at this price, namely that what all non-artists call form, one experiences as content, as the thing itself. Because of this, no doubt, one belongs to a world turned upside down: for henceforth all content appears as purely formal – including our life. Nietzsche wrote. Roland is precisely of this world: art is not his profession, but his existence.