Month: August 2025

Created in 1998, Bernay, Eure is an oil on canvas painting by Bernard Buffet (1928–1999), an iconic figure in 20th-century French art. A painter of melancholy, incisive lines, and silent landscapes, Buffet is now recognized as an essential artist on the international stage. His works feature in the most prestigious collections and museums, and continue to attract keen interest from collectors, art lovers, and institutions.

Bernay, Eure is a painting that powerfully illustrates one of Bernard Buffet‘s recurring themes: Normandy. A region dear to the painter, it was for him a refuge from Paris, a place of contemplation and inspiration. Here, the Normandy landscape becomes the setting for a peaceful scene, almost suspended in time.

The composition features a half-timbered house, typical of Norman architecture, with its exposed wooden structure and massive volumes. On the left, a stone turret stands tall, while on the right, an orange tractor seems to have just returned from a freshly plowed field. This lively, almost anecdotal detail gives the work a human and contemporary dimension.

The painting exudes a striking autumnal atmosphere. The bare trees with their rigid silhouettes, the pale yellow sky streaked with black, the brown furrows in the fields: everything evokes a season of transition, conducive to reflection. Yet, despite the severity of the lines, the overall effect remains warm and vibrant, thanks to the richness of the pictorial material and the depth of the colors.

Buffet captures a moment of rural life in an immediately recognizable aesthetic. The perspective of the central path, which leads to the door of the building, almost physically invites the viewer to enter this silent, intimate, and motionless world.

Bernay, Eure brings together all the elements that define Bernard Buffet’s artistic universe: strong architecture, stylized nature, powerful use of black, bold touches of color, and above all, an atmosphere that is both serious and poetic. Far from being austere, this painting is easy to live with: it captures the eye, evokes rural France, and arouses deep and immediate emotion.

Its large format, clarity, and formal richness make it a particularly emblematic work, both decorative and heritage-worthy.

The Hurtebize Gallery, located in Cannes and specializing in modern and contemporary art, has been supporting the market for Bernard Buffet‘s works for many years. His regular presence in the gallery’s exhibitions testifies to the importance it attaches to his work, both for its artistic value and for its role in the history of post-war French painting.

By regularly exhibiting major works by Buffet, the gallery allows an international audience to discover the richness of his work, his unique pictorial language, and his ability to powerfully convey simple and powerful emotions. Bernay, Eure is fully in line with this approach, embodying both the painter’s recognizable style and the depth of his attachment to the Normandy region.

For this summer season, Galerie Hurtebize is presenting a unique exhibition showcasing contemporary artists with distinctive artistic styles. Entitled Contemporary Summer Highlights, this exhibition brings together eight artists whose works range from stylized figuration to visual narration, gestural abstraction, and experimentation with materials.

Organized in two distinct spaces, the exhibition establishes a strong dialogue between two major currents in contemporary art: contemporary figurative representation and abstract research.

In the first room, three artists explore contemporary figurative art through very different but complementary approaches:

• Salifou Lindou offers compositions rich in contrasts, where drawing, collage, and visual symbols intertwine to evoke stories rooted in the African collective memory.
• Julien Colombier, meanwhile, deploys a graphic and decorative universe populated by stylized plant motifs, somewhere between abstraction and poetic figuration.
• Finally, Kim Duck Yong revisits the codes of traditional Korean painting through delicate and meditative pictorial marquetry.
  Each of these artists offers a sensitive representation of reality, rooted in a strong cultural heritage and personal aesthetic research.

In the second part of the exhibition, Galerie Hurtebize showcases artists whose work explores the expressive possibilities of materials and gestures:

• Bernard Bezzina works with paper as a sculptural material, playing with density, transparency, and light.
• Arthur Unger uses a rare pyrochemigram technique on copper, where chemistry becomes a tool for creation.
• Maryna Maryienko creates poetic abstraction through a secret technique that gives rise to unique organic textures.
• Jean-Jacques Marie continues the legacy of dripping with energetic gestural abstraction, where layers, movements, and colors are superimposed.

These works offer a true panorama of contemporary abstract creation, combining technical mastery and freedom of execution.

The Contemporary Summer Highlights exhibition is on display all summer long at the Hurtebize Gallery, located in the heart of Cannes, just a few steps from La Croisette.

🕦Opening hours: Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
📍Address: 17, La Croisette 06400 Cannes