The painting presented here, created during the spring lockdown, symbolizes the confinement of individuals in an unknown and threatening universe. From the outset, we can distinguish three bodies, hindered, encircled, separated from each other. Solitary forms tormented in a universe in motion, unstructured and incomprehensible. Profusion of forms, signs, explosion of colors. Everything appears convulsive, tortured in this work. It is a painting in tension, a painting of reaction.
Its title, "Psychosis", refers to a mental illness, an unusual psychological state. Psychosis" reflects a state of profound crisis that escapes the norm and abolishes benchmarks. Isolated from his fellow human beings, he is a stranger to himself. As often in his paintings, Bernard-Jacques Brisson shares his intimate experience to speak to the greatest number. Here, the intimacy of the hindered body, bruised by the experience, becomes a social body.

CASTLE OF CHAMARANDE   Exhibition "rencart" Regional Council of Essonne 2020

QUARANTINE

However, if the starting point of the work is a matter of lived experience, reality quickly gives way to the painter’s inspiration: fiery visions by the brush, and intuitions sublimated by the color. The "psychosis" suddenly becomes prodigious, excessive, a vital breath in the service of a legitimate rage. It is necessary to provoke the glance of the other, to incite him to look differently. The canvas thus becomes a field of experimentation where events of the order of the sensitive and not only of the visible occur. It is a question of detaching oneself from the image to make room for the energy of the painting. In "Psychosis", the nervous density of the bodies, the intensity of the chosen tones and the alternation of forms, flat tints and lines alone evoke the impact, the shock, inducing to the spectator a powerful sensation of maelstrom.
Bernard Jacques Brisson paints to ask questions, not to give answers. In this struggle for life or, at least, survival, that the Lockdown has constituted, "Psychosis" is an urgent statement.