Stéphane Bordarier

Since the mid-1980s, Stéphane Bordarier (born 1953) has developed a body of work within the historical movement in which painting became its own subject. Distinctive within the contemporary art landscape, his practice, attentive to what he calls the ‘quality of surface’, rests on a balance between imposed constraints and freedom of gesture.

Progressively reducing his pictorial language to the essentials, a colour and a form, Stéphane Bordarier explores the potential of a painting that is both rigorous and deeply sensitive.

His works arise from an unchanging process: on a canvas stretched over a stretcher and coated with warm animal glue, he applies the pigment while the glue sets.

The artist describes himself as then being ‘chased’ from the canvas by the material as it fixes, which determines the completion of the painting: colour and form come together in a resolution specific to each work.

Generally reduced to a single tone, the surface of the canvas acquires, through the impregnation of pigment mixed with glue, a matt appearance and a particular intensity. The painting is thus built in a close relationship with time.

In the Noires series, the colour, produced by mixing two tones directly on the canvas, never appears as a fixed or absolute value but reveals a subtle chromatic depth.

These works, traversed by shifting nuances and sensitive to light and to the movement of the viewer’s gaze, allow their process of making to be perceived. For nearly thirty years, the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris supported and showed the work of Stéphane Bordarier.

He is today represented by the Galerie Dina Vierny. Thanks to a recent acquisition supplemented by a gift from the artist, five works by Stéphane Bordarier entered the museum’s collections in 2026.

They are presented here alongside several loans from the studio, offering a meaningful overview of his career and pictorial research.