Stéphane Bordarier

Since the mid-1980s, Stéphane Bordarier (born 1953) has been developing a body of work that sits within this historical current in which painting becomes its own subject. Singular within the landscape of contemporary art, his practice, attentive to what he calls the 'surface quality,' rests on a balance between imposed constraints and freedom of gesture.

Gradually reducing his pictorial language to the essentials—a color, a form—Stéphane Bordarier explores the potential of a painting that is at once rigorous and sensitive. His works are born of an immutable process: on a canvas stretched over a frame and coated with warm hide glue, he applies pigment during the glue's setting time. The artist then feels himself 'driven' off the canvas by the material that fixes itself, determining the painting's completion: color and form harmonize in a resolution peculiar to each work. Usually reduced to a single tonal value, the surface of the canvas, impregnated with pigment mixed into the glue, acquires a matte appearance and a particular intensity. The painting thus develops in a close relationship to time.

In the Noires series, the color, derived from a mixture of two tones on the canvas itself, never appears as a fixed or absolute value but reveals a subtle chromatic depth. These works, traversed by changing nuances, sensitive to light and to the movement of the viewer's gaze, reveal their process of realization.

For nearly thirty years, Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris has accompanied and presented Stéphane Bordarier's work. He is now represented by Galerie Dina Vierny.

Thanks to a recent acquisition complemented by a donation from the artist, five works by Stéphane Bordarier joined the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2026. They are presented here alongside several loans from the studio, offering an overview of his career and his pictorial research.