Michel BOCART  painter                                                               Braine-l'Alleud - Belgium            michelbocart@hotmail.com
                                           

 

 

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        “Presenting a “sincere work”, outside of fashions and diktats: such is the horizon of Michel Bocart, an artist who paints with sand and charcoal without it being anecdotal.

Le Vif Weekend, Chek, n° 11 from March 13 to 19, 2015

 

        "The sensitivity of painters vibrates in the moments of life. Some of these are happy. The birth of a child for example. Others inspire anguish. Like illness when it carries finitude within it. Michel Bocart lived these two sides of life on the same day. Suddenly, this evidence was no longer literary, distant and, to say the least, intellectual but concrete and frontal. What followed was a series of paintings made from coal, sand and natural pigments. Some are dazzlingly clear. Others, black. One of them evokes a bottomless mouth like a cry launched from the depths of an abyss, of a chaos from which, says the Greek legend, the world would be born."

Guy Gilsoul, Juliette & Victor - February 2015

 

        "He is a painter and willingly works with a material used in construction: sand! Mixed with color, it offers its relief, itshooks of light, a quivering material. The predominantly monochrome paintings are non-figurative but allusive, suggestive, open to interpretations...."

Claude Lorent, La Libre culture, week of March 26 to April 1, 2014, p. 3

 

        "Michel Bocart in L.A. The artist from Braine-l'Alleud is going to the Pacific because he is invited to exhibit a selection of his work in the Sparta gallery which is opening in Los Angeles on the famous Sunset Boulevard. ...Stéphane Sparta has selected a dozen artists for this inauguration, among which Michel Bocart is the only Belgian.

Claude Lorent, La Libre, L'actu, June 2013

 

        "...And looking at a canvas, whose time will not have varied, as if frozen for eternity, is a way of reminding us of our finitude. And what other substance than sand, that which manipulated since childhood, can we best convey it? Like a light whose particles invade our memories in transparent "Bocartian" auroras: "I like space to be punctuated by color ....”

Jean-Philippe de Vogelaere, Le Soir, February 26, 2013

 

       "... He will then create paintings focused on the presentation of powerful symbols. Entitled "De Temps d'Espace" this exhibition will present a selection of Black Matters, canvases dominated by the velvety sensuality of blacks. Color associated with symbolism sand, also associated with Time. The artist also questions Space with a new series dominated by powerful blues.

Guy Gilsoul, Collect AAA, February 2013, UpTo Art Galeries.

 

       “Time, atmosphere, nature are the allies of Michel Bocart, who has given himself the impossible mission of rendering the elusive in painting. Impossible? Not because he does not seek to represent but to make people see, not to illustrate but to make people feel, to make people experience emotionally, visually, physically. He tracks the moment, the light, the passing natural phenomena, the ephemeral beauty of the vaporous and the aquatic, the energies of the telluric; either what surrounds us, influences us, moves us, can transport us, but also escapes us through immateriality.”

Claude Lorent, La Libre, Free Art: week from January 25 to January 31, 2013, p. 6

 

        "Time and Space have nourished the artist's reflections for a long time, always. Quite a challenge to translate within the limits of the painting his feeling of Time which only exists through him and of Space which seems to ignore it. looking at his paintings, we find ourselves projected outside of duration and into a permanent elsewhere.

The black monochrome canvases that some might have taken for a negation of Reality, respond in counterpoint to luminous works, inseparable textures of the same universe.

Louis Richardeau, journalists in Art and Letters – January 2013

 

       “Nearly 35 artists represented by galleries or cultural institutions from Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands were therefore invited to present their creations in this historic site.

Far from seeking exhaustiveness, it is a thoughtful selection of artists selected for their freedom of expression and their independence from the current market which is presented to the French public. From radical formalism to political or poetic inspirations, diversity and vitality are in the spotlight, far from the concerns experienced by Europe in crisis.

Art Média Agency, Paris, October 17, 2011. “Pearls of the North” exhibition, Palais d’Iéna in Paris from October 14 to October 23, 2011

 

       “….And it is all these interpretable facets that Michel Bocart exploits in a set exclusively devoted to black. More precisely to blacks, because if great rigor drives the whole, there is no monotony in this abundant journey. The artist focuses on materials and colors in order to create sensitive surfaces, receptacles of light, which play on the phenomenon of absorption and the capacities of radiation which results in an extremely varied range of nuances, so to speak constantly. changing according to the variable intensity of the light sources… 

Claude Lorent, La Libre Belgique, p. 17, 10 February 2010

       "Each new exhibition by Michel Bocart is an opportunity to measure the path traveled by this fertile artist, whose sensitivity is expressed in a painting full of material which is stripped away little by little, to retain only a flowering emotion. of thought. 

“Matières Noires” constitutes a sort of apology for his approach. Outside of time, space and anecdote, the canvas opens to meditation in a subtle dialogue between black and light, exploring new paths without however abandoning the thrilling sensuality of the surfaces.

Didier Paternoster, The Event, p. 53, February 2010

        "Michel Bocart's paintings are black, black in substance, a shiny black paint which catches the light and makes it dance as our gaze passes in front of the painting. Michel Bocart works specifically with the color black in the subtlety of his nuances, black as the only color that has the specificity to touch us, to surprise us in what we have most buried, of fears but also of sensuality."
Artexpo, February-March 10, news, p. 24

        "Probing the use of black in Renaissance painting and in the work of Rembrandt, Michel Bocart strives to make his favorite color sing in a thousand and one shades: bluish, reddish, deep, obscure blacks or on the contrary  ;luminous. The textures vary from velvety to satin, from matte to shiny, from smooth to rough. We would like to touch." 

Marie Pok, the Fan, p. 54, February 2010