LA BALADE DES VOYAGEURS
In collaboration with the 6th arrondissement town hall of Paris, Galeries Bartoux is pleased to invite you to discover the artworks of the artist BRUNO CATALANO at the heart of the artistic and literary centre of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Bleu de Chine is a dedication to all these men and women who arrived in Marseille to work there, but it is also a tribute to the adoptive home that is this city, with its harbour as epicenter. With its patina, china blue -the color of the overalls – gives allusion and reminds us of the uniform of the worker and the sailor. From this sculpture emanates a story that speaks to all the Marseillais people, in particular to the sea workers, to the dockers, to all those who unloaded the boats on the industrial port, whom Bruno Catalano was a part of, this immigrant from Morocco with a simple suitcase.
Van Gogh goes away, with a suitcase in his hand, to the Provencal countryside, but he is in an almost abstract lightness, open to wind and light. Is it not our destiny that Bruno Catalano gives us to see and meditate on ? Through his statuary he replays the adventure of mankind, always in-between two shores, repelling all the boundaries.
Traces of a mobile trip, or motionless. Because the Traveler is not the only one who has left everything to dream and join an elsewhere, because the Traveler, shoes on foot, suitcase in hand, in his right and dignified posture, represents each one of us, Bruno Catalano created Triptych, a clear and limpid metaphor for our human condition, defeating the taboo of aging and death. Whatever our path, wanderer or more sedentary, here is what will remain of us, ephemeral travellers on this Earth: a bit of chipped material, derisory. A pair of shoes, a suitcase, metaphors of the remainder of each human being after his passage. In the maturity of his work, the artist reveals more and more the concept of time going by; with Triptych, he proposes a crude and eloquent emblem of our mortality, simple travellers of life.
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Bruno Catalano began his career in 1990. The universal theme of the travel has always inspired him. Since his first work on clay, hundreds of travelers were born from his hands. The main engines of its creation are exile and detachment. Bruno Catalano expresses the idea of a nomadic humanity, proud of misfortune, in perpetual quest for a better future. His unique and original artworks reflect the feeling of distance of the artist, torn from his native country during his migration. This emotion is expressed through a stripping of the work through its process of insertion of voids in its characters on the road. The talent of Bruno Catalano lies in his ability to endow the elusive material with a transcendental essence. Being a romantic dreamer, his subject-sculpted cause takes shape in the fantastic frame of an ideal world where love, peace, beauty and harmony reign. These individual portraits are highlighted by daily scenes of travelers, strolling the empty spirit but transmitting a vibration, an unconscious sound. Bruno Catalano tries with this concept to address the men of today whatever their age, driven by this need of escape, persuaded to find elsewhere the happiness that they have not managed to achieve. Bruno Catalano was born in 1960 and now lives in Marseille.
