Studio of the painter Jean-Claude Besson-Girard (1938-2021)

mercredi 12 octobre 2022 14:30
Lyon , 2-4, rue Saint-Firmin 69008 Lyon
Sale information

Studio sale : Jean-Claude Besson-Girard (1938-2021)

Besson-Girard, look for him : he is elsewhere ! Does his painting jump out at you by its formal evidence? However, he always refuted, with force and reasons, being a hyperrealist painter. Following Leonardo da Vinci and Maurice Denis, he recalled that a painting is a "mental thing", "a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order assembled", in short, an abstraction, always "singular and enigmatic". He has only chosen the most difficult way to illustrate it: the apparent faithful "truth" of the subjects he loves. With him, the form, always at the service of a necessary and fragile beauty, drawn with a meticulous and patient brush, stores the light to restore it generously. The captured moment vibrates with a presence that fades incessantly. As he liked to repeat, his desire was to "reveal the presence of an absence".

For Besson-Girard was an uncompromising activist. Twice, when success rang too loudly at his door, he turned away from his art. To return to the land, by founding a farming community, or to defend it, as an actor committed to the path of "harmonic degrowth". Covering, as usual, countless sheets of paper with calligraphic writing, he drew from them the material of remarkable works dedicated to the ecological cause. While he was exhibiting in good Parisian galleries - in one of them François Mitterrand bought a painting from him - he feared to lose his artist's soul and definitively gave up exhibitions and the circuit that he considered mercantile. Each time, he returned to painting.

Self-taught, born with a pencil and colors at his fingertips, he frequented in Lyon his painter friends, who had passed through the Art Schools, Stéphane Braconnier with whom he explored for a time the paths, blind to him, of a more conventional abstraction or Cricor Garabetian with his poetic formalism bathed in the imagination of his roots. It is with them and while moving away from them that he discovered his personal vein, his so singular style.

Besson-Girard did not believe in the history of art. He saw no linearity or progress in artistic expression. He rather detected there permanent comings and goings where signs, graphs, abstract traces and more or less resembling figurations cross each other, in the course of the conventions of time. The whole crossed by dazzling ruptures, renewed modernities or passive repetitions. All in the service of the emotion, of this unexpected shaking which will seize the spectator and carry him out of him, to the edge of the essential: the tragic and the enjoyment mixed. The encounter with a "successful" painting must be an experience. Thus, he considered himself as the contemporary (artistically) of the anonymous authors of the cave art or of those of the portraits of Fayoum, of Vermeer, of Hopper or of Magritte...

His paintings are always subtle dialogues with works that have particularly moved him; they bear witness to the passing of time, like Memento mori, but also to the exultation of life and the facetious artifices that humans have known how to create in order to continue to rejoice.

His nude women are the granddaughters of Giorgione's and Titian's Venuses, tinged with the eroticism of good taste that Valadon or Charmy knew how to express; his genre scenes mix history and modernity in a discreet abundance of symbols; his portraits and, even more, his self-portraits have the subtlety and radicalism of those left to us by Roman Egypt, in the serene meeting of the death event and the triumphant life; his still lifes, a genre he insisted on calling "silent life", combine the suavity of Chardin's materials with Morandi's stripped poetry...

So many fruitful encounters and never plagiarism, or even homage too strong; a freedom in the constraint, quotations as evidence for an original work that only can leave a rare artist, a true artist.

Expert : Damien Voutay


Public exhibition :

  • Tuesday October 4: 10am-12pm and 2pm-6pm
  • Wednesday October 5 : 10am-12pm


Special conditions :


Artenchères is at your disposal for a more detailed state of conservation report, on request.

Photographic reproductions may not give an entirely accurate picture of the actual condition of a lot, notably because the colors or shadows shown in the reproduction may differ from what would be perceived by a direct observer. The dimensions of the Lots are given as an indication, with a reasonable margin of error (less than 10%). Not all defects are visible on the photos, and the appreciation of colors may differ depending on the screen.


The selling costs are 25.2% VAT included (Interenchères Live + 3.6% VAT included / Drouot Live + 2.16% VAT included).


Shipments - Transport :

- Pick up directly at our study on RV

- To mandate a third person to come to recover your purchases (thank you to communicate us the identity of the person by e-mail)

- To call upon Mail Boxes Etc : devis@mbelyon.fr or any other conveyor of your choice

- Buy a Colissimo box and send it to us to ship your lot

The lots must be

Sales conditions