(born Paris in 1931)
Les baigneuses (The Bathers), c.1965, signed Rancillac, oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Austria

„In addition to the activity of the New Realists influenced by Pierre Restany, which was for some time considered analogous to European Pop Art by the general public, France had other important groups whose exhibits presented the diverse tendencies of the politically and sociologically permeated ‘new figurative art’. In 1961, just a year after the establishment of the flash-famous Nouveaux Réalisme, artists such as Jacques Monory, Bernard Rancillac, Valerio Adami, Peter Klasen and Gerard Fromanger organised the exhibition “Nouvelle figuration” in Paris. [...] The artist and theorist Bernard Rancillac formulated his aesthetic aspirations not only as a counter to lyrical, informal abstraction, or indeed to the geometric, kinetic abstraction of the Paris gallery scene of the fifties, but also as an exploration of social reality: the artist sought not only to represent the visible reality, but also to interpret and critically explore it. In 1965, the major exhibition “Narrative Figuration” brought together 68 artists in Paris. The titles of both exhibitions clearly show the return of the figurative, that is, of artistic commitment to reflect reality in the image and to define the topic both as a narrative and commentary on the social reality. [...] The crisis of informal painting piqued the interest of young figurative artists in a new, objective, impersonal, figurative art, which sees the objects of everyday life and fragments of everyday situations, such as advertising, shop windows, newspapers, pictorial magazines or comics presented without aesthetic prejudice within the autonomous world of the image. [...] The activity of the Figuration Narrative group was one of the most consistent, aesthetically and politically clear statements of the 60s and 70s in the European art scene, which specified pictorial references in terms of political, sociological, and ideological realities, and which regarded art or artistic activity as a contemporaneously subversive and analytical examination of the social, political, ideological and mental situation, and indeed of the mechanism of power and methods of manipulation.”
His technique focuses on flat colour surfaces, strong chromatic contrast, schematization of forms and close-ups – as also seen in the present work, “Les baigneuses”.
(Lorand Hegyi, figuration narrative - criticism of the sculptural in the late-modern consumer society, in La figuration narrative, Vienna in 2002)