François Boisrond’s Practice of Painting in the 1980s

The article is devoted to the early period of creativity of the French artist François Boisrond. Member of the “Figuration libre” movement, he formed in the 1980s a specific language, close to comic strips, graffiti, and mass media printed products, which embodied the characteristic tendencies of the “New Wave” art. There were the spontaneity, emotion, and plastic emancipation in the spirit of “barbaric” syncretism contrasted to the intellectual elitism of the conceptualist practices. Redefining the boundaries and areas of art, Boisrond tried to establish a new relationship with objects and rituals of everyday life. This capacious model of cultural production is charged with an endless game of clichés - quotations and references to the highest examples that take the most banal form. The artist explores visual and semantic capabilities of the “mise en abyme”, playing with the traditional motif of “picture in picture” on the territory of the simplified, “clip” autobiographical description, compressed to the image of a tautological, self-looped visual depiction.

«Figuration libre», «новая волна», François Boisrond, “Figuration libre”, postmodernism, neo-expressionism, “New Wave”, comic strips, self-portrait, post-graffiti

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2. Catalogue de l’exposition 5/5 Figuration Libre. France/USA, ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Publ., 1984, 72 p.

3. French spirit today. Catalogue. Los Angeles, U.S.C. Publ., La Jolla, M.C.A. Publ., 1984.