OFFICIALLY REGISTERED AS: GREGOIRE BOONZAIER ART INVESTMENTS CC
DIRECTOR MEMBERS: ANTON BOONZAIER / EMILE BOONZAIER / SYBRAND SMIT
Copyright © 2009 A.L. BOONZAIER. (ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)
Below are paintings or sections of others that have been selected deliberately for publication to illustrate early influences and later “borrowings” previously mentioned, as well as to show how difficult (and foolish) it is to try to label the ever-changing technical mixtures used by Gregoire in each of his pot-pourri experiments.
HAUGUE SCHOOL?
IMPRESSIONISM?
POST-IMPRESSIONISM?
EXPRESSIONISM?
WHAT NOW?
A LITTLE MINIMAL?
CUBISM?
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
WITH IMPASTO?
WITH IMPASTO?
GEOMETRIC
DISTORTION?
DISTORTION?
RETROPRESSIONISM?
NO-ISM?
SOME ABSTRACT SQUIGGLING?
SPARSE-ISM?
A BIT OF DRIP?
GUESS THE ISM?
50 years ago (paraphrased) Gregoire remarked that art has never been photographic, that the artist’s personality has always determined how he depicts his world and that to escape the camera via certain modernist trends concentrating on one aspect of the craft, viz. only colour, only texture, etc., are self-confining. The brilliance of originators like Pollock, Rothko and Riley was not in dispute. Gregoire was questioning the extent to which they could sustain their innovations without repeating themselves and whether being influenced by them would ever amount to more than copying. Despite the logic of this, he was branded by some as a conservative outside of new developments and catering to popular taste. Truth is that Gregoire chose to remain Gregoire: whatever he could “borrow” from new idiom he did, adapting and subtly incorporating it as his own. Many viewers do not relate to much of his work in which distortion, exaggeration, very sparse or heavy impasto effects, scumbling, most unusual colour combinations, etc., are applied.
Fortunately for them Gregoire executed tentatively at first before abstracting (eliminating) more and more towards still recognisable configurations of essence.
Fortunately for them Gregoire executed tentatively at first before abstracting (eliminating) more and more towards still recognisable configurations of essence.
Two forgotten smart alecs (smarting from earlier insults by Gregoire – forgive the pun!) who respectively called him “the people’s painter” and said he could as well have exhibited painted photographs were deliberately defaming his person and artistic integrity in petty retaliation. This exhibition and the numerous books featuring Gregoire’s work refute such blatant libel. Gregoire played chess with buildings and altered their architecture; he similarly re-modelled trees, flowers and objects, people and himself according to his pictorial purposes. This undoubtedly needs more scrutiny on the part of theorists. He was certainly pre-occupied with visual art as an expression of dignity (but only vaguely in the sense of Keats’s Grecian urn being a joy forever, and therefore the embodiment of a truth beyond the here and now). He believed that war, poverty and disease were themes better suited to literature. One can close a book, but not easily live looking at horror (except in an art gallery awhile). This does not necessarily imply that most pictorial art is ultimately decorative – a topic for later perhaps.
Compiled by Anton Boonzaier
