The dream of Nicolas Buffe (ニコラ ビュフの夢)by Thomas Golsenne

Thomas Golsenne

2007

Text taken from the catalog published by Editions Ereme during the solo exhibition Hypnerotomachies held at Gallery Schirman & Beaucé in 2007.

 

Nicolas Buffe’s work, at first glance, is not very serious. His imagination is inhabited by comic strip characters, icons of video games, and other animation stars: an imagination that refuses the “adult” world and turns its back on Contemporary Art’s current references. As if confirming this refusal, Buffe structures his compositions with an ornamental repertory inherited from the Renaissance and 17th Century: cartouches, grotesques. With an astonishing virtuosity and irrefutable sense of humour, he combines the “High Culture” of the museum world and the “pop culture” of his youth.

But Buffe’s work isn’t by far only a postmodernist joke, or a decorative pastime. It is punctured by a much more profound question, which totally justifies his references to the Renaissance. This is the question of Artistic Inventiveness. Ever since the Romanticists, this has been confused with “inspiration” or “genius”: it is the manifestation of the creative gesture. For Nicolas Buffe, just as for the Renaissance artists, Invention is in fact a derivative of discovery and craftsmanship.

The inventor isn’t he who creates without a previous model thanks to his own genius; but in fact is the person who discovers in pre-existent works remarkable shapes, isolates them and creates new combinations from them. In this way, a do-it-yourselfer creates a new machine from used odds and ends; the decorator uses motifs already drawn to create new images. The master Artist-Craftsman-Decorator is not a person whose genius has isolated him from the human species, but in fact a person who is able to create original associations using the shapes that he puts together like so many puzzle pieces.

By adopting the ornamental structure of the Renaissance grotesques as a background to his compositions, Nicolas Buffe has chosen a type of decoration based essentially on his subjective choices: the grotesques are hybrids in which the most daring associations are permitted, if not recommended. It was these grotesques that defined the structure used by Montaigne in his Essais, which were a heteroclite mixture of citations and original texts; the grotesques that a sixteenth century author called “pictorial daydreams”, in that they so imitated the thoughts that are shaped by our dreams. The goal of Buffe is much more serious than it first appears, it is born of a “serious game” so prized during the Renaissance, that conjugates pure invention, pleasure and knowledge.

In the framework of this exhibition, Nicolas Buffe has chosen to precisely illustrate a Renaissance daydream, The Strife Of Love In A Dream (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili). Published anonymously in 1499, this novel of initiation was a best seller in the 16th century, despite (or perhaps, because of ) its hermetic status. Poliphilio, like all other Renaissance man of letters dreamt of a revived Antiquity, assimilated to the lady that filled his thoughts, Polia. Throughout the love story schema that is apparent in the text, it is an astonishing description of all kinds of ruins and monuments, inscriptions in all languages that combined to create a legacy of unlimited culture and curiosity without bounds. The real interest of this book lies in the assemblage of the diverse literary models, images and texts, writ- ten or visual sources, a combination that far surpasses modern day divergences of fiction and history, real or mythical Antiquity. In brief, a heteroclite composition in which the two emblems of the book are hieroglyphics and the grotesques, both invented by the anonymous author of Poliphilio’s Strife Of Love In A Dream. Nicolas Buffe would be hard put to find a more exact entity with which to exercise his talent than this prolific book.

Thomas Golsenne

Translated by Holly Warner

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