Publications

Guillaume Bottazzi: Dreamlike Spaces

Mechteld Jungerius – TL Magazine – May 2021

A sculpture created by Guillaume Bottazzi attempts to modify our perception of the environment.

Located in Mallet-Stevens’ garden, adjoined to Villa Cavrois, a three-meter-high sculpture was created by Guillaume Bottazzi in May 2021. This creation aims to take us into an unreal world that modifies our perception of the environment. It seeks to nourish the passer-by by offering a form of unreality and making his dream. It creates a dreamlike space that evolves and brings the joy of dwelling to a place of living.

The works of Guillaume Bottazzi create dreamlike spaces a dreamlike space in which we live. Space does not exist in itself but is a mental construction. These works beyond reality modify our environment and make our dream. This is the reason why imagination takes precedence in the creation of the spaces we occupy, since – above all – we inhabit dreamlike spaces. Our imagination conditions our perceptions and our thoughts. The spaces we inhabit are not an objective container of elements. These poetic spaces nourish our creativity and stimulate our construction.

Guillaume Bottazzi is a French visual artist, born in 1971, who has had his studio in Brussels since 2012. At the age of 17, he decided to become an artist and to make it his sole activity. He began studying painting in Italy, in Florence. Back in France, as a competition award winner, he set up in a workshop granted to him by the French Ministry of Culture which he subsequently left to migrate to the South of France. Later, he left to live and develop his career in New York. Guillaume Bottazzi has developed his work in several countries, especially in Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Curved art in the real world: a psychological look at the art of Guillaume Bottazzi

Helmut Leder and Marcos Nadal* – University of Vienna – Faculty of Psychology Department of Basic Reasearch and Research Methods – August 2019

*Helmut Leder and Marcos Nadal are the authors of a paper entitled  “The effects of art on the brain” covering ten years of research. 

Before you continue reading this, please take a look at the space around you.

You are most likely indoors. How did we guess this? Well, today most people spend close to 90% of their life inside buildings. Moreover, it is also likely that most of the objects that surround you, and the elements that constitute the room you are in, are human-made, designed by a human creator. Have you ever thought about how these surroundings affect the ways you feel, think, and behave?

The artist Guillaume Bottazzi has devoted much of his work to actively designing aspects of the environment. He has achieved this not only by producing objects—such as artworks or three dimensional artworks—that can become part of the environment, but also by interventions that change the visual appearance of large-scale environments themselves. Such interventions influence our perception and evaluation of those surroundings—and much more! For example, how we feel.

This is how Guillaume Bottazzi’s art looks through the lens of psychology. But why approach his art—or any art for that matter—from a psychological perspective? Psychology is the science of mind and behavior. As such, it seeks to understand what makes us who we are as individuals and communities, what moves us and what stops us, what drives us to achieve, what makes us want and feel, and where our joys and miseries come from. An important part of who we are, and of how we feel, has to do with our interactions with our environment; specifically with the way we shape and experience our immediate surroundings.

Today, psychology is mostly practiced as an empirical science; it is based on data that were collected in experiments aiming to test and prove psychological theories. In our daily business as researchers in Psychology, therefore, we often conduct laboratory and field experiments, systematic observations, and collect data that either support or contradict the hypotheses that guide our studies. More than 150 years of inquiry have revealed many things about how the human mind and brain work. If art has anything to do with human emotion and reason, or with how humans view themselves and their world—and we are convinced that it does—then Psychology can contribute to understanding the way art in general, and Bottazzi’s art in particular, is experienced.

When psychology was founded as an academic discipline in the late 19th century, most research was concerned with sensory perception. In the tradition of Herman Helmhotz, and other great physiologists of that time, psychologists aimed to measure the intimate side of simple acts of perception: How does light arriving through the eyes get translated into a sensory experience? How does this feel? Is this subjective experience lawfully related to the amount and intensity of light? Pursuing this sorts of questions produced a greatly successful line of research. It revealed many of the feats and tricks the human mind uses to understand the world, but also many of its biases, constraints, and limitations that help it deal with the vast array of information and events taking place around us. Some of these feats and constraints combine to endow humans with a certain memory span, a limited focus of attention, or the perception of color constancy and visual grouping, among many other possible examples. However, a different tradition has aimed to understand much more complex perceptual experiences, such as apprehending images, artworks, or even the full complex scene of our environment as it appears to us. This approach was already called for by the founders of this “new science” of Psychology in the 19th century, but for many reasons its development was much slower. And, although a science of perception of art is now established in Psychology , the perception and appreciation of our environment has only recently gained a relevant place in Psychology.

What do we know about the perception of our environment? We know that people can identify images as depicting a seaside landscape, a forest scene, or a human-made environment with only a glimpse, even when these images are presented for as briefly as a 1/10th of a second . Regarding preferences for certain environments, we know that people like nature as seen from a safe and hidden vantage point, with some views and possibilities for further exploration , and that people consistently like images that show landscape scenes more than urban scenes .

This latter finding is particularly striking, because we spend a vast amount of our time in human-made environments. If you think of your daily routines, and those of the people you know, it is easy to see how only rarely do people in western countries encounter untouched nature. Why have so few studies been conducted to understand how environments designed and created by humans influence our lives and our feelings? This is one of the mysteries of our research field. It is difficult to understand, because even common sense suggests that the design and creation of living environments might benefit from knowledge about the way that people perceive and evaluate the different alternatives of how environments look.

One thing is very clear, though: people respond to the aspects of objects and places, and among these are basic visual features. Psychologists, and philosophers before them, have long searched for basic visual elements that guide our preferences, and affect our feelings and well-being.

So, are there any general laws that can predict what most people will like? One consistent finding is that curvature influences aesthetic responses. People prefer curved objects to sharp ones . This has been shown for car design, where curved design is often liked more , while apparently taste and fashion also affect such preferences. More systematically, it was demonstrated that when people were shown images of object such as watches, sofas, toys, and so on, on a computer screen for very brief times, then the curved-contour versions of the objects were liked much more . In a follow-up study, these researchers also found evidence that the preference for curved contours is related to lower activity in brain regions that can be associated with fear . So, curved contours could be preferred because they seem less harmful, or plain and simply because they are inherently attractive . The idea that curvature is an aesthetic primitive confirms philosophers’ claims since the 18th century. Burke, for instance, believed that beauty is smooth, without edges or sharp angles. In this respect, Guillaume Bottazzi’s work exemplifies the use of these basic features, which elicit pleasure automatically, probably unconsciously, and are attractive to the eye. Like many artists, he intuitively applies these principles and produces visual doses of sensory pleasure.

This picture of Bottazzi’s exhibition in Miyanomori International Museum of Art in 2011 also show a distinct contrast between the shapes in the art and major architectural elements, such as the frames, the ceiling, the different non-curved sharp angles. The presence of straight elements is not unusual—you may check again your current surroundings.

So the question arises whether architecture might be an exception of our preference for curvature. To find this out, together with a large network of colleagues from psychology, neuroscience and architecture, we conducted a study in which we asked participants to look at carefully selected images of modern interior architecture spaces. They were asked to evaluate each interior space, and while they did so we recorded their brain activity by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. We examined “how systematic variation in contour impacts aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions, outcome measures of interest to both architects and users of spaces alike.” (p. 10446).

The people who took part in our experiment found the interior spaces with curved contours much more beautiful than those composed mostly of straight lines and corners, as in the other aforementioned aesthetic domains. The brain imaging results showed that viewing the curved contour rooms was associated with an increase in activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region known to respond to the emotional importance of objects and to their rewarding aspects. We were also able to show that participants’ beauty assessment and their concurrent brain activity were driven mainly by pleasantness. From these results we concluded that “the well-established effect of contour on aesthetic preference can be extended to architecture. Furthermore, the combination of our behavioral and neural evidence underscores the role of emotion in our preference for curvilinear objects in this domain.” (p. 10446)

Thus, even in architecture curvature elicits pleasant feelings, which lead to a stronger appreciation of beauty in architectural designs that contain such curved visual features. This is a crucial finding for two reasons. First, it was believed that such preference was primarily related to objects that could be handled and grasped. We now know it also applies to the spaces that envelope us. Second, most of the architectural spaces we inhabit are not curved. However, Art has the potential to bring this feature in. This is what Bottazzi’s work does. The examples in Figure 2 show how very straight shapes, cube-like buildings, are camouflaged by the wall paintings of Bottazzi—not only do they bathe the façades with color, they also resolve the shape towards a more pleasing, aesthetically preferred curvature and roundness.

In this respect, Bottazzi’s interventions are part of a long tradition of using wall paintings to create illusions that do not correspond to an underlying physical structure—as seen, for instance, in baroque architecture or the Spanish art-deco movements, most known through the works of Gaudi. However, the design of human-made environment could benefit from knowledge and research and insight about the factors that affect people in their living environment.

Thus, the perception of art and architecture from a psychological perspective reveals that both produce fascinating objects that bring pleasure through beauty and aesthetic qualities into our everyday life and surroundings. If our thoughts are correct, then you should also be able to receive small doses of pleasure by looking at pictures of—and surrounding yourself by—Guillaume Bottazzi’s art.

The daily symbiosis between the city and art 

Juan Paolo Casado, Bachelor of Hispanic Literature – Arte Al Limite – June 2017

Large-scale interventions in public spaces dialogue with the observers through the psychology that radiates from the pleasure of calmness. The abstract work of the French painter Guillaume Bottazzi seeks to bring the art that regularly traverses the city closer to the citizens. The inspiration originating in the sensuality encapsulated in Latin culture marked the beginning of a life dedicated to art. Guillaume Bottazzi migrated from France at 17 to the Italian city of Florence. It was here, in one of the centres of Western culture, that he started to perfect a visual language that is dedicated to occupying public spaces from the point of abstraction.

“My works in public spaces are usually permanent, but an exhibition in a museum is a fleeting moment”, Bottazzi explains. He has been utilizing open-air structures in urban locations such as Brussels, Hong-Kong, and Tokyo to convey a message that, according to the artist, transforms the aesthetic experience into a daily element. For the French painter, constantly putting work on display for the audience helps him understand and experiment art as a reality that adds value to day-to-day life.

The manner in which the poetics of the artist takes over the space causes an impact on the observer. In a dialogue between work and environment, the bonds between individuals and their environment are emphasized through the monumental scale of each piece. These characteristics motivate the observers to move around to appreciate the piece in its entirety. The immersion achieved through discovery involves all these elements organically. This way, “the work becomes part of the personal experience of the audience”, explains the artist.

“I believe that rules must be broken at the moment of creation,” Bottazzi states. For him, boredom stems from repetition, and inspiration can’t be reduced to structures due to its rebellious and capricious nature. “Creating a work of art, for me, is an act of sublimation, a way of overcoming one’s own personality,” he confirms.

The penetration and impact caused by Bottazzi’s creations go beyond the volume conjured up by three-dimensionality. The interventions are set up as part of the environment; an environment that the visitors reclaim from a new perspective when they see it intervened by the artist. Psychology plays a vital role in this conversation, as it’s the mediator that gives shape to the subjective experience in each observer.

The immersive tools provided by abstract art allow Bottazzi to create ethereal shapes that, as if they were steam, are blurred and blended with the surface. ”The support is an integral part of the piece and gives off the idea of infinity. I ‘m showing the visible and invisible,” the painter says. To exemplify this, it suffices to look at the role of light, which crosses through the frames that delimits and contains each painting.

The large sizes that Bottazzi’s creations usually have require the artist to spend weeks working in public places. From the beginning, the creation of the work is open to bystanders. This performance act opens the intervention to the public that traverse the area. The final result radiates pleasant and calming sensations that accompany the pedestrians that frequently pass by the location of the work. This is how art becomes a daily principle in the life of ordinary citizens.

The vertical and horizontal lines that shape the cities and foster anxiety among their inhabitants are in symbiotic contrast to the relaxing and delightful curves whispered by Bottazzi. In this manner, the audience isn’t directed towards any specific direction, as the works are abstract and don’t carry titles that guide perception under the structure of a predetermined narrative. For the artist, “a work of art defies the creative potential of the observer. Like Kandinsky, I think that art is “evolution”. Art influences the development of the observer.” The author behind the piece acquires a secondary role; it’s no longer the artist telling their story, the intention is to cause a psychological effect in the observer.

Understanding the French artist

Chaubau – Scarcity Hong Kong – May 2016

The following story is typical of a modern artist: at the age of seventeen, the decision is taken to become an artist; the family is against it, believing their child will die from hunger; and the child leaves home to make his dreams come true. Maybe some people haven’t heard this story before, but it is inspirational and its protagonist is the French artist Guillaume Bottazzi.

The French fine artist Guillaume Bottazzi is holding his first exhibition in Hong Kong, where he is showing 23 recent large scale works in three exhibition halls at the Hong Kong Central Library.

The second part of this inspirational story is that during the next five years the protagonist, Guillaume Bottazzi, became a full-time, internationally known artist, who gained fame and fortune, producing over 40 works in public spaces.

I was surprised by Guillaume Bottazzi’s modesty when I met him for the first time. Despite his reputation and his rich international experience, he is as shy and simple as a young man. Despite the emphasis he places on the art of the previous four centuries and despite his international reputation, he describes himself as a young artist, and when he says that his work is the expression of a great idea he does not say it with the tone of authority but he looks at you with a serious expression and tells you, smiling shyly, that “I want the public to have its own view, you should use your own imagination”.

I do not understand Guillaume Bottazzi’s many works, but I feel very comfortable with them, almost at peace. Looking at the lines and shapes that float against a monochrome background makes you really want to ask the artist what they mean and what ideas they convey. Then, as you continue your visit of the exhibition, you realise that none of the paintings have a title. When I quizzed the artist, he answered that the graphic lines are not physical references but carry with them their own emotions and make you organise your thoughts. Asked about the atmosphere he wants to create, the artist answers “I want to know what you think”.

To discuss this I take as an example the most colourful painting with a plain background that fills an entire wall. Here is the resulting exchange: I said that in this painting I saw a kind of prehistoric microbe, with shells. He listened carefully and nodded, non-committal, finally saying that his works are “the freedom of painting” and draw something by themselves. The painting often reveals transparent objects, distilling light and shadow in a traditional way and then you notice that the angles of light projection are in fact irrational, that the light comes from every direction, vertically and horizontally, in scattered films. It is a creation that refuses to take physics into account. The artist says he just wants to create an atmosphere of the image, so that it can interact with the environment.

I would say that Guillaume is a serious painter, from the way he dresses to the way he carries on a conversation, but we shouldn’t be fooled by appearances. He is the first to have come to Hong Kong for an exhibition and be prepared to talk directly to visitors. He is also personally leading workshops during the exhibition, where you can meet him and enjoy a rare creative experience. The work produced during the workshops will be shown in the exhibition hall.

In 2011, Guillaume Botazzi gave a marvellous new look to the Miyanomori International Art Museum at Sapporo in Japan. He spent three months producing a 900 m² painting on the outside walls of the museum, using the red, orange and yellow colours that are his mark. It is currently the biggest painting in Japan. Four documentaries are being shown in the exhibition, one of which explains for the first time the process of producing the work.

Finally, I asked the painter to choose one of his favourite works in the exhibition, so that I could take a photograph of him in front of it. He answered that “My favourite work is not in this exhibition, because it hasn’t been created yet; it is the next one that I’m going to paint”. I was now used to his way of replying, so I didn’t panic. I chose a painting with a bright pink background on which several circles resembling floating white bubbles were painted. Guillaume Bottazzi stood in front of the picture, demonstrating that he thought it was an interesting choice.

I told him “I think pink resembles your character, that’s why I chose the painting”. He replied: “Pink is my favourite colour, it creates a feeling of happiness; I want my paintings to make people happy…”

Colours take flight

Guy Gilsoul, art critic – Le Vif L’Express – November 2016

Guillaume Bottazzi (born in 1971) occasionally forsakes canvas for a gentler, even a silkier textile, pulled taught and whose red colour serves him as a background.

Like Matisse, he has understood that a fabric’s texture has the ability to radiate and create the impression of infinite space. At this point, he hasn’t yet picked up a brush. This living surface is not a “background”, a wall in relation to which the form will become a relief, a weight. The brushwork will resemble the brush strokes of Japanese calligraphers. Bottazzi will lay down traces of colour, often white, always pale, as though the essential concern is to retain the breath in the gesture. But he is not a calligrapher. His hand is directed more in a caress than a movement. It works slowly, precisely, sometimes using a system of stencils, as do the master-creators of kimonos. Bubbles form, seeds or cells, or yet again comma form and swell from a trembling void, slowly rising to the top of the composition. Sometimes whiteness is achieved with a light drift of plaster. Sometimes a glaze of oil colour is deposited on the surface. Often chromaticism is restricted to the definition of an outline, as Western painters used to do when representing a tear, or a drop of water. These works without titles invite the spectator on a spiritual voyage. Bottazzi has also made a name for himself in the field of wall paintings. He has produced around forty so far, the latest of which is a fresco that is being created right now at Place Jourdan in Etterbeek. We prefer works that are on a human scale, leaving to architecture the right to defend itself using its own language.

Guillaume Bottazzi illuminates the walls

Christian Schmitt, art critic – Le Nouveau Cénacle – September 2015

Colours, passages and time: thoughts on the art of Guillaume Bottazzi

O. Douville, psychoanalyst and anthropologist – May 2012

Those who have spent even a short time with Guillaume Bottazzi will have encountered his subtle medley of determination and sensitivity. He does not talk about his art like a journey that can be summed up or like a career, but rather like a gesture, one that nourishes an emotional grammar of space. His art is receptive and unfamiliar with the formal divide between spectator and artwork since he has overcome that chasm and is able to make the forms and colours of bodies and sensations flow together in strategic parts of the city, inviting spectators to inhabit his paintings rather than simply observe them. Large painted walls look like steamers coming towards us, inviting us on a voyage; they brighten and uplift the tones and rhythms of urban space.

Guillaume Bottazzi is able to make formal metamorphosis materialize before us and is as such able to reunite and reconstruct things long separated – public and private life, body and mind; he relentlessly works on the enigma of the spectator’s presence within the paintings and surroundings observed, and yet never is his work, albeit very free, in any way immediate or strictly spontaneous. It is much more. It is solidly rooted in both a culture and a passion. That of Italian art, of Fra Angelico, studied early on, when the artist was barely in his twenties. Then came a passion for travel, trips and encounters. Next, things flourished and accelerated: a studio in Lyon, consecration in America and the Japanese adventure starting in 2004.

And then Asia. A world in which art conjures as much as it shows; a world in which deliberate obliqueness and fertile allusiveness demand different approaches to seeing and sensing. A foray into otherness, too. A constant, turbulent renewal. A modern and intense blending of speed and depth of perception. Museums where movement fuses with new creations to create events in city space and thus re-present, reclaim and reconstruct the body of monuments. This is the case at the Miyanomori International Museum of Art in Sapporo where the museum’s facades have become the backdrop for a Guillaume Bottazzi creation covering 900m². Another monumental mark left on Japan is an abstract work of 3.30 m by 33 m long in Tokyo which alludes to the traffic flows and haste which pulse through and shape space in a district that never rests, is always on the go, eventful and which finds in this masterpiece its glistening and moving reflection. A work that become part of the inheritage of the city, monumental and thus visible from numerous vantage points which are more or less errant or stationary, up close or distant, attentive or furtive; the presence of the surface in these variations of intensity creates a desire to look at the painting by moving with it and almost within it. Perception of Guillaume Bottazzi’s work is thus subordinate to the body of all those who encounter it. A body summoned, provoked and then finally invited to move beyond the banal acknowledgement of a lifeless or frozen gaze..

There is something very musical at work which stems from a perpetual swaying between the different possibilities of what is seen, the interlacing of its layers and dynamic. The work is not solitary, sentenced to the silence of seclusion; it becomes serial, calling for and at the same time creating a very large audience which is at once its inspiration, witness and protector.span>

An art of connections and metamorphosis. Creating, giving us much to see, but not trying to explain any more than necessary. Getting others equally involved. In Japan, France or elsewhere, the regorous generosity of Guillaume Bottazzi makes him present for all those who look at and inhabit his work.

Here too, and again, Japan – where cultural mediation is non-existent – serves as a telltale territory. Working with spectators, getting them involved in the time it takes and for the duration of the creation, talking to them, appearing as a body that is set up in a place while creating forms, rhythms and colours, all of this forms an event. If Guillaume Bottazzi’s art is able to upset fixedness with a stream of transformations, it is certainly because his presented and monumentalized art calls out much more so than would something that is finitely set. I see the source of an adventure that uses a backdrop and network of sensations to test of what the spectator is – deliberately or unwittingly – capable. The artist’s aesthetic adventures call on sensory components which ground the body in time and space. With their resounding and gleaming physique, vivid materiality, joyous yet controlled turmoil, and through the spaces in which they exist, the artist’s creations encourage transformation.

If, at each encounter, they seem to float, imbibed with lightness and scansion in the overly geometrical and cumbersome layout of flat and cubic space in our cities, time is nonetheless present. And, as such, the paintings are also slow, they require endurance and our relationship changes with each one. And then they become independent again. They once again become what those who look at, visit and feel inspired by them, wish them to be. The paintings journey on with each publicly commissioned piece.

I would really like to insist on the call to the body which is so strong in all of Guillaume Bottazzi’s work since it is also rooted beyond the strictly aesthetic realm, and point up its depth based on a totally incredible experience. The artist attempted and tackled an experiment in artistic mediation with blind people in France and deaf people in Japan. An experiment with obvious limitations, that required a great force of conversion and translation and which, by altering the way things are usually experienced, created a spectator in a borderline state, an impending witness. Art in this context was the root of a concrete gesture, one that is to the point and seeks out metamorphosis of feelings and experience, without allowing itself to be intimidated or stifled by a ready-made theory or psychology of sensations. The art of Guillaume Bottazzi intertwines similar and diverse forms and tenses. An exemplary case of this is when it rightly assumes a topos that is both mental and physical, in which the body’s senses and flows can invent new forms of time and types of glimmer, can experience ways of displaying things with which they were not yet familiar, that they had not even imagined. Like all innovative art, in doing so, Guillaume Bottazzi draws out the childhood (not childish) potential that all transformations require – a hidden and erotic potential to shift conventional sensory grammar.

Above and beyond injury – be it from so-called “disability” or catastrophe, the artist not only makes the world more attractive, he also makes it fit to live in and share, he dresses it up to bring out its enigmatic and playful side.

About Guillaume Bottazzi

Y. Takaishi – May 2009

In his abstract paintings, Guillaume Bottazzi refrains from representing anything or imposing any emotion. All his paintings are untitled. Unbound by meanings that might limit the imagination, we approach his paintings directly in the absence of clues. Your interpretation of the work depends on how open you are to it. Even the scale of the work corresponds to the vision of viewer, at times seeming infinitely wide or impossibly minute.

For the most part, humans have been making artworks, in the form of paintings and sculptures, to reflect the things they see in the world. Since prehistorical days, our creations have grown as countless as the stars. The impulse to create art may remain unchanged since Lascaux, but what about the need to see art? Some cognitive neuroscientists tells us that the brain, like the computer, is skilled at editing and organizing the data it accumulates, but less talented at creating data. Thus, when people look at an artwork, they see it through the filter of their knowledge and experiences. Odd, ungraspable forms that shape-shift from gases to liquids to solids inhabit Guillaume Bottazzi’s paintings. Some of the new works in this exhibition evoke steam, fire, smoke, and molten material; others are reminiscent of swelling and floating balloons; still others look like dividing cells.

In his previous work, we saw strong contrasting colors applied in garrulous relief-like impastos. But recently, the lavish, thick-surfaced painting has given way to transparent washes of thinner pigments on unprimed canvas. He now achieves mass and density through purity of color. Compositions are simpler yet increasingly dense, a shift that generates tension. This change in style evolved after Bottazzi’s first trip to Japan several years ago. The artist himself has admitted to being influenced by the stoic spirit of Japanese traditional arts such as Sumi painting.

Bottazzi, however, has consistently maintained his straightforward use of the layering and glazing techniques of classical oil painting. He has worked with other media and techniques, but feels painting with a brush suits him best. We witness similar brushwork in the murals that he creates in parallel to his other work, even if the “canvases” here are the four external walls of a twenty-meter tall building. Despite the strict conditions of working on site-specific murals, Guillaume Bottazzi enjoys painting the large-scale permanent projects, which are open to public view. Working at the tumultuous forefront of a creative field, he struggles to maintain his painterly course and push the boundaries of two-dimensional art.

Why do people make art? What is it about art that attracts them? In the midst of recent financial crisis and economic turmoil, some may think that questions like these are superfluous. Indeed, art may have no practical value, yet our interest in it shows no signs of abating. Perhaps it is because art awakens unfamiliar sensations, and leads our consciousness towards new ways of looking at things. And, in these times of economic and social uncertainty – when doubt reigns and the future is murky – we may need art more than ever.

Encountering an extraordinary artwork makes one realize how rare creative ability is; the artist’s power to invent goes beyond that of the average person. Tracing over Bottazzi’s paintings, we see multiple layers of expanding fields moving from the depths of the picture plane out into three dimensions, making us aware of the passage of time in the process. Although Bottazzi may be working unconsciously, with no specific intent, his painting has a catalysing effect. It is full of a strange charm that tempts us towards new adventures.

G.Bottazzi’s abstraction 

Y. Takaishi – November 2006

When you look at a painting by Guillaume Bottazzi, the first things you notice are the mysterious, moving forms. The shapes, bulbous and elastic, appear to float and expand in space. The imbalance between their soft lightness and dense mass and the deliberately skewed composition give rise to an uncanny atmosphere. What at first glance seems to have been painted with a freewheeling hand has actually been rendered with an exacting and exquisite rhythm.

G.Bottazzi’s unique use of strong colors and light and shadow gives one the strange sense that the picture plane is warped or slanted. In one new work, for example, a yellow hemisphere sports an irregular array of smaller half-spheres. The false shading applied to the large hemisphere fosters the illusion of light coming from all directions at once. The incongruity he creates by destroying balance on purpose gives birth to a defiant energy. Moreover, the soft warmth suffusing the images is engendered by a palette that seems to seal in and muffle light. Up close, you are surprised to discover that G.Bottazzi uses classical oil painting technique, where a diligent and repeated layering of paint results in a shining surface.

G.Bottazzi decided to become an artist in his teens and left his native France for Italy, where he was deeply influenced by Italian painting. Since then, he has continued to make his art while traveling around the world. The artist is now thirty-five and the delicate painterly texture and gradation in his present work are the fruits of long years of cultivation. His obsession with his materials is complete; he uses only the finest paints, canvas, and extremely soft brushes to carefully create one work after the other. The thickly applied paint that gives massivity to his early works threatens to overflow the borders of his forms and freezes them within the picture plane. His newer works offer a more delicate and refined impression. This may be a reflection of the strong impact traditional Japanese art had on G.Bottazzi during a recent visit here. Nonetheless, the garrulity of his early canvasses seems to have been replaced by a growing sharpness.

As G.Bottazzi becomes more interested in abstraction, his inexhaustible and boundless ideas continue to push the frontiers. Painters of abstract art at the beginning of the 20th century experimented with a host of expressive styles; G.Bottazzi distances himself from this tactic and instead using the classical technique of oil painting seeks a fresh approach that fits in no genre. Confronted with some singular piece of art, many of us may wonder what exactly it is we are seeing. A moment later, we have the curious sense of being asked just how we are interpreting the picture in front of us. The sensual, sometimes even figurative elements of the painting lead the viewer to a misleading sense of comfort, almost to a sense of reality. The object of the painting is never too far away; one can almost touch it. But before long one is engulfed by another corner of the canvas, a compositional shift, another awakening of the senses. Conflicting sensations leave the viewer with no choice but to recompose and reshuffle his or her perceptions. In the midst of such shifts, a joyful individual “re-creative” abstraction occurs. The work itself is the collection of these individual re-creations and re-compositions. As such it is fundamentally open-ended.

One’s view of a work depends, of course, on one’s understanding, but G.Bottazzi’s work has the power to lead us beyond the mere quest for interpretation. It possesses the underlying power to force the viewer to unconsciously reevaluate his or her notion of the abstract which is originally defined as “the extraction of specific characteristics and attributes. “His art is both a means for us to question conventional ideas of abstraction and a mode of expression that transcends this question. It appeals to the senses sometimes using figurative elements, but the plurality of the conflicting elements in the images invariably tempts the individual viewer to make his own personal and free re-creation. It is none other than G.Bottazzi’s new, dynamic vision of abstract art.