Untitled

"Entering a Bernard Piffaretti painting exhibition first of all involves addressing a series of what the artist calls “painterly situations”. These, as the viewer will have no trouble in recognising, represent modernist abstraction whose codes and components have been gradually defined in the course of the last century.

Any explanation of a Piffaretti painting necessarily involves outlining a method, one that consists in dividing the blank canvas in two with a vertical line and marking one half with a set of signs, signals and traces which are then duplicated on the other half: a process that makes Piffaretti part of the long history of those “split images” and pictures within a picture which all speak of painting as a reflexive tool for making the work of painting visible. So every Piffaretti painting is a meta-picture, a mirror-device in which one part, as a consecutive, adjacent recreation, reflects the production scenario of the image to be found in the other part.” (Arnauld Pierre)