There is pertinence to the distinctly French character of the references his works evoke, for Brisson’s work continues the lineage of French twentieth-century painting. While Brisson spent many years in Paris, his painterly practice is proudly rooted in southern France, and like Henri Matisse and other painters of the postwar École de Nice he draws on the ravishing geographic beauty of the Mediterranean. Brisson, who has revisited the paper cuts and floral motifs of Henri Matisse, has been called a “neo-Fauvist.” The first of the avant-garde movements that flourished in France in the early years of the twentieth century, the Fauves (“wild beasts”) favored bold, often oppositional colors and a subjective response to nature. Like the Fauves, Brisson’s relationship with nature breaks with Impressionism’s sensibility evoked through plein-air paintings, and like the Fauves, his colors (aquamarine, cobalt blue, Pompeian red) evoke emotion, perceptual joy, and relations among colored planes on the canvas. Nature becomes the link between observation of the natural world and the treatment of it in the painter’s studio. An even deeper consideration of Matisse’s philosophical investigations offers a conceptual lens through which to view Brisson’s work. In Pierre Marie’s recent paintings, motifs conduct doublings, varieties, and repetitions. The figure of a paper-cut palm frond returns as the missing figure from the remainder of the paper or is reflected in the floral pattern of the wallpaper appearing underneath. Matisse repeatedly de-emphasizes individual objects, claiming, “I see too many things to be able to commit myself to a single one.” Matisse would repeat patterns across materialities within the same painterly space. Plants would sit on a table whose legs were made from wrought iron
plants, an ornate chair with plants would rest in front of a floral textile sample. These various materialities share a pattern quality; as with the slow investigations of Brisson’s seagulls, the materials guide the eye to other spaces the viewer cannot see. The motifs of palm fronds and flowers in Brisson’s recent work move in cycles, like forms in nature. A rhythm runs through these repetitions. Composition and rhythm are like a fugue in which the artist returns over and over again to the same theme or like a jazz musician who visits the same motif to allow for wild experimentation on an oft-quoted reference. Brisson, who has himself acknowledged his dedication to jazz from Orléans, is precisely like the musician returning to the same refrain to experiment with its structure and rhythm. In Matisse’s work, as in jazz, each element blends together as an ensemble. In Brisson’s work, the viewers are at once present with the object in the painter’s studio, their memories, and their minds. Constantly reappearing, these motifs give a renewed sense of both history and language being written. Brisson’s paintings reveal the ephemeral quality of being human and the fragile language through which humans claim to document their experience as humans. His work chronicles the underlying pulse of art through life—its ability to recall our past, reflect our present, and envision our future. Maibritt Borgen Art Historian, New York
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His distinct multilayered surfaces and ensembles of repeated organic and mythical motifs carry on from previous works, now congealing in a pictorial language in full bloom.
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