My fascination with intense colour and a methodical overlay of paint on surface has
developed over many years. My paintings explore and incorporate the building up layers of paint:
overlapping and forming patterns creating different pictorial planes. I address the whole world of
senses, the materiality of paint and its expression across the surface of the canvas. I want people to
experience the physicality of each work. Paint that generously spills over onto the edges of the
canvas as well as the smeared layers of impasto on the surface.

My paintings evoke the medium of oil paint as both form and content as in the ‘plasticien’
tradition. It is a chromatic exploration of fractures or ruptures in colour and pictorial planes.
Varied evocations are created on the canvases as coats of oil paint are slowly applied and
built up in different degrees. The oil paintings spread across the surface in a series of striated ribbons
or passages. These painted movements are broken down to chromatic rhythmic fields within the
striated bands of oil paint. They are assembled to produce a pictorial vocabulary that explores the
exhilarating power of colour and oil paint. The building up of pigment layers requires coordination
and patience due to the different amounts of time required for drying in between applications. As a
result of this incremental process, the lines that result from my repeated movements of paint on
canvas are often lucent and viscous producing bold, tactile systems of contrasting colours. Colours
merge to form organic pulsations within the painting’s surface. The paint oozes from the edges of
each band exposing the undercoats. Ultimately these layered bands of colour will begin to move,
creating rhythms and fractures within the oscillating eye. These flirtations of colour are luminous,
rich in oil paint and create optically vibrant relationships upon the canvas. My work explores the
radiant encounter of physical matter, light and perception.

PAUL BUREAU
2008