About

Born in 1960 in Versailles into a family of seafaring aviators hailing from the south of Brittany.

Starts painting in 1980.

Today she lives and works in South of France, she has been working as a painter and set designer (street theater, cinema, events, etc.) for the past 20 years.

Her paintings are permanently presented in her workshop and have been shown in galleries and private exhibitions in France for the past 10 years.

Medium

Oil on wood
Oil on Glass

Artistic Approach

All that the sea has to offer at its most majestic, the formation of waves in the high seas, the explosion of light upon mountains of moving water. For many years now my work seeks to express this light in its state of perpetual obliteration. I have been working for a long time on prepared wooden surfaces, using beeswax as lacquer, all the while maintaining a very textured visual aspect.

Some years ago I discovered glass...and what I was looking for. The wetness of water, its coldness, its hardness. I don’t work the transparency of my paintings, the works are totally opaque, made of multiple layers of paint; it’s the very texture of the glass which gives the illusion of transparency. This work has nothing to do with hyperrealism, I am never in contact with the images; it’s a work of observation of the real brought to image through my own personal filters.

Articles

Original

‘‘Les œuvres de Véronique Robert-Bancharelle exposées à la galerie Métisse de La Rochelle n’ont aucun point commun avec les peintures pour touristes que l'on trouve inévitablement dans les villes portuaires. Accrochées dans un lieu d’exposition qui rappelle certaines galeries de la rue de Seine, elles offrent des paysages imaginaires, tout en camaïeu de noir, de bleu ou de jaune. Le travail de la lumière est d’un rendu exemplaire : c’est un tableau où le gris se joue du noir qui, depuis la rue, avait attiré mon attention en me faisant un instant penser à Soulages et ses outrenoirs. Pourtant, en dépit d’un choix identique de pigmentations, il n’y a rien de commun entre les reliefs de la matière chez celui-ci et les surfaces absolument lisses des panneaux de Véronique Robert-Bancharelle. Chez elle, le travail à pleine pâte se réalise sur la palette (énorme, 4 m2 de verre) ; la peinture est ensuite étalée à l’aide de larges brosses de peintre en bâtiment, puis étirée, patiemment grattée avec des spatules de vitrier. A voir le résultat, la subtilité des textures, on peine à imaginer l’utilisation de tels instruments. Et l’on s’interroge sur la surface polie comme un miroir. Le secret en est simple, mais plutôt original : une application finale de cire d’abeille.

Dans L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, Jean Genet écrivait, à propos d’un portrait : « Vu de l’atelier […] le portrait m’apparait d’abord comme un enchevêtrement de lignes courbes, virgules, cercles fermés traversés d’une sécante, plutôt roses, gris ou noirs – un étrange vert s’y mêle aussi – enchevêtrement très délicat qu’il était en train de faire, où sans doute il se perdait. Mais j’ai l’idée de sortir le tableau dans la cour : le résultat et effrayant. A mesure que je m’éloigne, […] le visage avec tout son modelé m’apparait, s’impose, […] vient à ma rencontre, fond sur moi et se précipite dans la toile d’où il partait, devient d’une présence, d’une réalité et d’un relief terribles. »

Avec les tableaux de Véronique Robert-Bancharelle, c’est exactement à la démarche inverse qu’il faut se livrer. De loin, on songe à une peinture abstraite dont on devine pourtant qu’elle cache autre chose, et c’est en se rapprochant que les détails apparaissent, nuages, vagues, tempêtes et brumes. Les amoureux d’un lever du jour en Bretagne ne seront pas dépaysés ; ils trouveront ici, toutefois, davantage de mystère. Univers marin donc ? Sans aucun doute, mais il serait probablement impropre de qualifier de « marines » ces huiles où le ciel prend autant d’importance que la mer (on ne peut davantage appeler « marines » la série des vagues peintes par Gustave Courbet, ni celles qui viennent mourir sur les plages oniriques de Jean-Pierre Alaux). Cela tient peut-être au fait que l’artiste, bien que bercée depuis son enfance par des récits maritimes, travaille dans un atelier situé dans les Cévennes dont le relief évoque autant de vagues minérales.

On ne peut que recommander aux voyageurs qui se rendraient à La Rochelle une visite à cette exposition temporaire soutenue par la Fondation E.c.art Pomaret (sous l’égide de l’Institut de France), et à cette galerie dont les choix artistiques sortent des sentiers battus.’’

Thierry Savatier, écrivain, spécialiste en littérature et histoire du 19ème siècle

Article publié dans Le Monde.fr en 2010.

Translated

Coastal towns, above all the most touristic ones, have their overwhelmingly fair share of art galleries stuffed with with maritime subjects. Maritime painted post-cards with docked trawlers, boats on a background of inevitable low-tides. At best, albeit pretty stereotyped, they are the work of local artists ; at worst they are mass produced canvases run up by chain-gangs of Chinese copyists in one of the specialised workshops in Peking or Shenzhen. Decorative paintings, no doubt, but then they often bring more to mind the kilometers of painted pebbles or fake bookbindings that are everywhere.

The works of Veronique Robert Bancharelle viewed in a gallery have absolutely nothing in common with these paintings made for tourists. Hung in a location which brought to mind certain galleries in La rue de la Seine in Paris, they conjure up imaginary landscapes all in shades of black, blue or yellow. The light within them is remarkable ; a tableau in which grey unfolds into black caught my eye from the street, making me think for a moment of Soulages and his plus-blacks. And yet, despite an identical choice of pigments, there is nothing shared between the depths of the matter of the latter and the absolutely smooth surfaces of Veronique Robert Bancharelle’s panels. With her the colour work takes place around a huge palette (4m2 of glass) ; the paint is applied with large house-painter’s brushes, then spread, and patiently scraped with putty knives. When one sees the result, with it’s subtlety of textures, it’s almost impossible to imagine the tools involved. And the mirror-like surface is in itself a mystery. The secret is simple, and more than original : a final coat of beeswax.

In Alberto Giacometti’s Studio, Jean Genet wrote, speaking of a portrait : « Seen from the workshop (...) the portrait appears to be a crossover of lines, curves, closed bisected circles, mostly pinks, greys or blacks - a strange green is in there too – a very delicate tangle that he was making, and inside which he was maybe getting lost. But I have the idea to bring the painting outside into the courtyard : the result is frightening.The further away I go (...) the face and all the model imposes itself, (...) comes to meet me, melts into me and rushes into the canvas from which it came, becomes a presence, with terrible depth and reality ».

With Veronique Robert Bancharelle’s tableaux the approach is exactly the opposite. From afar one thinks of an abstract painting in which maybe something is hidden, and as one approaches the details emerge, clouds, waves, storms and mists. Those who love dawn in Brittany will feel completely at home ; yet here they will come across deeper mystery. A maritime universe, then ? Without the shadow of a doubt, but it would be unjust to qualify as ‘Maritime’ these paintings where the sky takes on the same importance as the sea (we cannot either qualify as ‘maritime’ the series of waves painted by Gustave Courbet, nor those which come to die on the dreamlike beaches of Pierre Alaux). Maybe this comes from the fact that the artist, despite having passed a childhood steeped in stories of seas and of mariners, has a studio in the Cevennes mountains in the South of France, in a landscape where the waves are mineral.

To those travelling to La Rochelle we can’t recommend highly enough a visit to this temporary exhibition set up by the E.c.art Pomaret Foundation (under the aegis of the Institut de France), and to this gallery whose artistic choices are far off the beaten track. Its founder, Anne Mathieu, who was the director of communications after having worked at Sygma and R.E.A, offers artists a helping hand in their creative processes and the promotion of their work under the title of « Visible Arts », an initiative which would do well to be encouraged.

Thierry Savatier, art historian, specialist in the litterature and the history of the 19th century.

Article published in Le Monde.fr in 2010.

Awards

  • Member of the Taylor Foundation

  • Winner of the Ecart Pomaret Foundation prize

  • Winner of the Chaussier Gestion creation award