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Collectors' Views

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Jean d'Yvoire, philosophe

Sometimes you might think you're seeing the angry or excited drawing of a child.

From the moment I had in my hands the small binder where these fourteen drawings by Roland Buraud were arranged, I was seized by them. Each of them arrests the gaze, impregnating it with its movements, making it resonate with the scansions of the body that it seeks to contain or express. And, from one to the other, the gaze passes and returns, making each one a whole and all a series, where one glimpses the movement that gave them life.

I see Roland Buraud's eye, I see it come to life, spring forth - he explores, he waits, but the wait is brief, he grasps the vibration of a few movements suddenly distraught, suddenly trapped; this eye then turns around, internalizes itself until it loses sight, it couples with the breath, holds it, releases it, merges with it, intensifies and, at the lowest point in the abdomen, metamorphoses, it blindly stretches until it rises towards the shoulder, passes into the arm, acts through the wrist, seizes the hand, it dispossesses the pencil lead in a fleeting stroke - and brings to the visible the overflowing or retracted intensities in the moment of a body dispossessed of itself. There is something of a force, a desire, an energy, a power, which, far from the conceptualization that these terms have undergone in our language, would perhaps evoke what in the East of our Earth, a foreign civilization, with which Roland Buraud had discovered some kinship, is called "chi".

This force, this flow, this "chi", vibrates and dances in the perfectly projected, perfectly contained impulse of the painter's gestures. The lines tense, sometimes in the tiny evanescence of the gesture, sometimes under the strong pressure of the arm in contact with the paper. They thus capture living bodies - women's bodies, falling bodies, intertwined bodies - bodies open to passion, contained on the edges of madness, devoured by life.

Sometimes we would think we were seeing the angry or exalted sketching of a child, but of a child who knows everything about the calligraphy of bodies and Eros. The child, yes, is not far away, he is also there when the line, without excess or prejudice this time, traces the double circle of a generous breast. He is there in the ironic look of an amused or disguised third party that some drawings depict on their summer. He is there, haunted by the history of painting and the almost archetypal figures that it has forged: lamentation, descent from the cross, elevation.

These extreme or tiny variations in the intensity of the line, exactly but as if blindly mastered, give these drawings a depth which is in no way that of perspective, but which is that of bodies and dance, of flesh and desire, when they have touched the blindest edges of existence.

It is in an unusual but handy intermediate-sized briefcase that I keep these drawings by Roland Buraud. These drawings that I have here, I have them not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of possession, a demanding and exhilarating possession, which, in contrast to my daily life, has tied my fascination for this painter whom I did not know and who gave himself entirely to his art.

John of Yvoire

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©2025 by Etienne Buraud

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