Multiple and disparate images, graphics, scribbled lists and notations all vie with one another on the pages of Thurman’s handmade notebooks: the gritty, the profane, the refined, the referential, all subjects are reduced to equal status on these worn-thin working pages. They are modern diptych-miniatures (mixed media on wood), and with their movable pages and changing compositions, are able to combine with elements of many styles (trompe l’oeil, figuration, expressionism, minimalism, constructivism, to name a few…) in defining the artist’s personal narrative.

The standardized format of the books (mixed media on wood), offers a neutral surface onto which I stage my little dramas, project memories and vent anxieties. They are make-believe sketchbooks, pasted over and cut up, storyboards with movable pages. Referential in nature and constructivist in process, they could be looked upon as modern day (miniature) diptychs. I try not to plan them out too much in advance or pre-design them. They have an unfinished feel, a grit due to their being themselves both studies and works in progress. In a sense, the notebooks are a parody of the design process itself, a virtual sketchpad that has become my personal narrative.

In the beginning, I guess, he tried to picture himself as the detective he would have been in one of those films noirs from the Fifties – the smoky black and white, the ceremony of the line-up, one for the road in a greasy joint… Little by little, he put together the sketches of an investigation that never took place, for a murder that was never committed – and yet still haunted him. As he was rolling back his boats into the past, a silent dialog began between the painter and the child he had been; his memory created visions and ghosts and rather than brushing them aside, as most of us tend to do, he let himself slip into an underworld of shadows. Whether he paints the amber reflections on a forgotten tumbler, the fuzzy sketch of a usual suspect or the heavily made-up face of an aging stripper, Bruce Thurman takes his viewer away from the cliché, into a disturbing intimacy. He paints a world undone, almost consumed, that never ceases to echo through our lives and bite into our hearts.

Un homme qui se souvient est un homme en souffrance – mémoire du corps, antérieure à nous, qui nous fait dépositaires de misères incompréhensibles, de joies indécelables. Il est possible qu’un artiste ne soit rien d’autre qu’un enfant perdu dans la brume, acharné à poser les mains sur des ombres qui fuient. Le temps l’isole, le plonge plus profondément en lui-même et c’est cela qui, à la dernière minute, comme en catastrophe, le rend apte à partager avec les autres la drôle de communion du presque invisible. Qu’il peigne les reflets d’ambre d’un verre oublié sur une table de bar, les silhouettes grises des suspects réunis pour le line-up d’un crime improbable, la fin d’une cigarette, le corps exposé d’une femme trop maquillée, Bruce Thurman nous entraîne loin du kitsch du film noir revisité, dans l’étreinte d’une intimité rudement conquise : c’est le regard d’un enfant qui dérobe à la nuit des images enfumées, prenant sur lui d’évoquer enfin les fantômes qui n’ont cessé de le hanter. Pour nous, passants, reste la beauté consumée, défaite, de ce monde, qui n’en finit pas de nous raconter notre vie et de nous griffer le cœur.

Antoine AUDOUARD – 2004