Corrugated plastic plates, paint colors on bags and sheets, the components in Bernard Gracier’s paintings give the impression of déjà vu, objects of the ready-made according to Duchamp. For his projects, he is mainly focused on collage and painting, using everyday urban materials – such as lime, tar, wood, plastic bags, angle iron – upon which he draws and creates. His artworks are inspired from his contemplations of the city, of the mixture of images, mediums and references.

Thusly, Bernard Gracier displays the anodyne energy contained in trivial objects and explores the gap that is created between the perception we have of the object in our culture or our emotional memory, and the one we have of it today.

This estrangement that goes beyond the formal function of the artwork, speaks of us, and frees the dialectical relation between the fabricated object and the one who looks at it.

A propos de l’artiste

Arriving to Casablanca in the beginnings of the year 2000, the painter and designer Bernard Gracier had started with photography as he was seduced by the richness of the architectural styles of the indomitable metropolis, its art-deco masterpieces, its disorder and its monstrous development. “I admired the superposition of architectures, social classes, time, and the stratified history. All eras overlap (…). To take this history into account is what has always been done in art.”

Texts
• Texte de Bernard Collet (FR)
• Texte de Bernard Collet (AR)