Guy De Rougement, LA LIGNE SERPENTINE: KETABI BOURDET - 22, PASSAGE DAUPHINE 75006 PARIS

Following Guy de Rougemont, peintre avant tout in October 2024, which offered a retrospective of the artist's painted production from 1965 to the 2000s, this new exhibition-sitting between painting and sculpture-highlights works from the Serpentines series. Produced in the 2000s, these works mark a moment where line and color achieve a renewed freedom.  

 

A Rediscovered Baroqueism

 

The serpentine line appears late in Rougemont's body of work, serving as both a return to his initial curvilinear inspirations and a final accomplishment. It marks the culmination of a long journey through the different states of color, following several decades of geometric rigor and the methodical construction of space. At the end of the 1990s, this undulating line gradually imposed itself, softening frameworks, bending surfaces, and liberating the gesture without ever breaking from the artist's previous research. Following the ellipse, the cylinder, the hatched surface, and the "de-hatched" (dé-tramés) works of the 1990s, the serpentine opens a new field. In its presence, color-previously treated in bold flat tints-becomes nuanced, complex, and begins to breathe. Light and shadow cease to oppose each other frontally, instead engaging in dialogue within a continuous, almost organic movement. The curve becomes the site of a profound reconciliation between thought and feeling, between intellectual construction and pictorial intuition, between rigor and the pleasure of painting. "According to slow or rapid entwinements, ascending or returning upon themselves, the serpentine line finds its color in the movement of real light, only to lose it in the immobility of figured light. These two tempos, these two states, are metaphors of the spirit: between the agitation of the outside world and the serenity of meditation," Rougemont emphasized.  

 

This serpentine line is movement, internal tension, and vital energy. It engages the gaze in a mobile experience without a single viewpoint, forcing the eye to follow its windings and circulate within the space of the painting or around the sculpture. An heir to the linea serpentinata theorized by the 16th-century Italian Mannerist masters-Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino-it shares its complexity and fertile instability while resolutely standing apart from them.  

 

From One Serpentine to Another

 

The appearance of the serpentine line occurs in a progressive and nuanced manner. Between 1999 and 2002, it remains thin and supple, in close dialogue with the large flat areas of color characterizing the dé-tramés, and with the "flashes of light" developed since the 1980s, which reflect the artist's great mastery of transparency and translucency. The line acts as a slender and fluid link, fitting into a space that is still structured-sometimes segmented-where it slides, overlaps, or contradicts the framework without abolishing it.   From 2003 onwards, the serpentine asserts itself fully. It thickens, becomes broader and more voluptuous, taking over the surface with new confidence. This evolution is not a rupture but an expansion: the line retains the memory of the grids, notably reconnecting with the "lights" of the 1980s. The dense color captures and redistributes the luminous flux, while the curve, now sovereign, organizes the circulation of the gaze. These constant echoes of forms highlight the profound continuity of Rougemont's visual language, based on variation and transformation rather than a succession of styles.   A late but decisive usage, the serpentine line appears today as the most accurate form to express what runs through Rougemont's entire body of work: a painting of duration, movement, and life. "The serpentine line allows everyone's fantasies to find expression: the swirls of a mountain stream, the billows of clouds, the folds of a silky fabric, the vine branches... The serpentine line is a line of life, of adventures," noted Rougemont. At the dawn of the new century, the artist signaled a return to his earliest aspirations, where abstraction, freed from all constraints, fully reunites with the living.   

 

Julie Goy