Painting By Bernard Morteyrol, 2001

Born in 1942 and died in 2019, Bernard Morteyrol lived in Paris for almost forty years. Reconnecting with painting in the 1960s, he is part of Narrative Figuration by inviting the spectator to decipher reality by means of a critical analysis of the images that invade their daily lives, in particular comic strips and advertising. A member of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in the 1970s, he exhibited alongside Fromanger, Ernest Pignon Ernest, or Guyomard, and invited himself into the debate on the reification of society through images. The message takes precedence over the material, he favors the legibility of the image which he sets up as a means of social and political resistance. To restore the narrative in his works, each canvas is part of a series, allowing the establishment of organized iconographic themes. Painting is a communication tool, a discourse, which has its roots in reality. Although he came to settle in the Var, first in Aups then in Villecroze where he has lived and worked since 1985, he continues to use painting as a communication strategy. Thus, in his series on "September 11", he makes the American flag weep in the red bands but retains the American denunciations of the sixties, transposing the stars into signs of American dollars. In our society where the image is generally subject to the viewer's attention for only a few seconds, Morteyrol's work reminds us that a painting takes some time to be perceived, deciphered and analysed. To confront his paintings is to question the deviations of the society around us.