Sound and color1986–1988
The Sound of the Sea
1989, 38 x 51 ins
nitrocellulose on canvas
Private collection
PIERRE GAUDIBERT « ARC–EN–CIEL DE BELLEGARDE » EXPOSITION MUSÉE DE NIORT ET MUSÉe CHÂTELLERAULT, CATALOG PREFACE, PARIS 1988 (extracts)
When I presented an anthology, covering approximately sixty works by Bellegarde, to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (ARC) in April 1971, there were numerous works therein from the 1960s, particularly the typograms, which began in 1963 and the psycolor cubicles (1965).
Perhaps today the development of a new point of departure is underway, on a canvas traversed by a powerful, curving rainbow indicating the primary energies linked to the four basic elements of life: air, fire, water, and earth; vegetation, flowers even, seem ready to unfold, according to a tension that charged color with a maximum of kinetic vibrations.
The rainbow with the iridescent phenomenon has always been one of the preferred themes of Bellegarde’s paintings. Let us not forget that it remains charge with symbolic signification, thus when Ferdinand de Lesseps was in Egypt, he had a sudden vision in which a rainbow joined together the Occident and the Oriental, giving an integral, initiatory meaning to the building of the Suez Canal.
For color simultaneously acts and expresses; it is a force that overwhelms the physique and the psyche joined together and, at the same time, it emits a message. For this reason, color is in part doubly linked with deep ecology, understood as maintaining the equilibrium of the individual and the society in their harmonious concord with the cosmos.
The entire painted oeuvre of Claude Bellegarde, all his research into color, is simultaneously a universe of sensorial ecstasy, of suggested meanings and models, and so many matrices for rediscovering a proper individual and social use of colors.
