Pierre BETTENCOURT: Taking Flight: A Selection of Collages of Butterfly Wings

Taking Flight: A Selection of Collages of Butterfly Wings

The Galerie Christophe Gaillard is pleased to announce a new presentation of the work of Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006), by arrangement with the artist’s estate, who have entrusted this representation to the gallery.A poet, storyteller, and fabulist, but also a printer and painter, from 1953 onwards, Pierre Bettencourt hunted butterflies in the company of his friend Jean Dubuffet and made his first collages out of butterfly wings. At that time, Dubuffet wrote to him regarding these butterfly works: “Yours are much better than mine, they present the specific possibilities of expression of butterfly wings much better than mine do; they obey much more concerted and confident reasoning and are in all respects much more impressive. What’s more, in this case, I emulated you…”


This was how PB described this lepidopteran, at once a fabulous material and an inexhaustible source of inspiration:*

The butterfly was my first master for painting, a painter become paint, which hurried to exhibit it everywhere. Dangerous exhibition: the master was killed, only its work of art was retained. My first familiar mentor: in kinship with the paper, it willingly applied tone on tone, thus masking its essential difference – freedom. Perhaps one of the first motorised liberties in the world, which plays on the wind but no longer depends on it. Already traversing oceans along its aerial corridor. Sometimes deprived of a digestive system – that father of all systems – and experiencing only an ephemeral nuptial flight. Love, freedom: its two themes. Its schedule full, before becoming dust, or being struck mid-flight by something quicker than itself. Make haste. Its opportunities spread across a very short span of time, although incalculable to it; disseminated as well over so many heads, like comprehensive all-risk insurance. The butterfly, master of metamorphosis, from caterpillar to chrysalid. And foremostly a layer of countless eggs. (A law ought to be established between quantity of eggs and level of consciousness: the higher the level of consciousness, the less the species lays. Its risks diminish.) Telling in and of itself the story of birth and death and resurrection and death again. You rise to the heavens only for a moment, but an eternal moment. Its eternity, your eternity; if we knew, if we dare. If our prayer had wings. The butterfly or the prayer incarnate, without concern for a God to pray to. Light in butterfly form.

Furry, but nocturnal, to protect itself from the cold.

More species by night than by day, but also delighted by the merest beam. In both cases, antennae capable of remotely identifying the emitter of a perfume, along its olfactive wavelength. That of “its flutter”. Yet only able to give birth to itself. Tirelessly repeating its subject, for millennia. Painting Mona Lisa on the first try. That’s enough. No improvement possible, no dissatisfaction possible, all these substitutes for consciousness. Definitively pleased with itself.

Never leaving its bliss. Knowing only to repeat it. There is no end of singing the praises and highlighting the limits of this natural born artist. The first printer, what’s more, drawing its polychromy towards infinite copies, always in advance of the censorship of death, issuing its carefree paper-butterfly from its inexhaustible sun-supply.

But more abstract than figurative and already a sign within a relationship of signs, bearer of formidable streaks, its horoscope; owl’s eyes before the owl and also drawing the pure line of perfectly lined lips, before man. Nevertheless, the artist never caught in the act, gifted with all-knowingness, creating its painting by heart, with eyes closed, by night. And that does not make the slightest misstep, its scales overlapping like roofing tiles according to the pre-established design.

Imagination in the purest state, yet devoid of imagination. Emerging perfect from its metamorphosis, knowing nothing other than perfection.

Occasional accidents, a wing that refuses to inflate. Impossible to take flight, that first exhilarating flight.

That of a creature that has always flown.

The nomination by Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) of his totem animal says it all (or almost all): the man of letters, books and art published and sometimes illustrated poems, fables, essays, and pastiches, from 1940 onwards, inventing an expressive typography from 1940 to 1961 and from 1954, a strange sculptural-painting. Throughout his life, besides his own work, he also published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, Bernard Collin, and Jean Dubuffet. As a fierce individualist, he did not belong to any literary or artistic movement and lived somewhat withdrawn from artistic circuits, in Normandy and later Burgundy.

The works of Pierre Bettencourt have been exhibited at the Galerie René Drouin, the Galerie Daniel Cordier, then at Galerie Beaubourg, and finally that of Baudouin Lebon in Paris. They are currently conserved at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the musée de Grenoble, the Centre d'art contemporain de l'abbaye d'Auberive, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, or the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

* Pierre Bettencourt, excerpt from "l'oeuf sauvage" [the wild egg], Editions Pleine marge, 1997.
Translated by Anna Knight.