Exhibition Aquagravure. Grand masters in relief

Not everyone in the history of art is recognized as the inventor of a technique. Strictly speaking, in the secrecy of his workshops, Pablo Picasso never invented anything. Entrusting himself to the skilled hands of potters, enamellers, gilders or lithographers, he simply let his genius run free, bringing his glory to the tradition of the multiple. What would he have thought, in 1989, if he’d still been working, and had met Bernard Pras, the inventor of aquagravure? We like to imagine the scene… On one side, the little man with a round face and dark, lively, mobile eyes, like those of a faun or a bullfighter. On the other, Bernard Pras, thirty-seven at the time. An artist who also graduated from the Toulouse School of Fine Arts in 1974. His hope as he started his career? To paint and photograph the universe. Painting, photography, but also innovation, for this print enthusiast was thinking of a new technique, capable of producing limited, individually numbered and signed prints. He could have been told that wood engraving, practiced in China since the 7^th century, was available for this purpose. That metal engraving was invented in Florence in the 15t^h century. That there was lithography, gradually perfected between 1795 and 1799 by a marvelous Bavarian, Aloys Senefelder. Finally, that there were also the solid colors of silkscreen printing, brought back into fashion by the troublemakers of American pop art… But it just so happened that Bernard Pras had little taste for the uniform use of solid colours. What was he dreaming of, faced with the unknown of a blank sheet of paper? Stronger colors. More vibrant colors. Ruffled, streaming colors, like a woman slowly shaking her hair under a circle of light. Warm, gnarled, muscular colors, less painted than sculpted. In other words, relief paintings!