JEAN BOUVIER - Landscapes

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WildFarm
Spacecraft, a Wildfarm Project, by Patrick Lang, Tina Hulett, Kristopher Moller and Ryan Hattig

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Jean Bouvier
FORET - 2004, oil on canvas, 64.5" x 51"

The paintings we present are recent works of the French painter Jean Bouvier who, since his adolescence, has happily led - in spite of difficult moments - a persevering research before the capricious and ephemeral seductions of nature.

The works of Jean Bouvier reflect the silence from which they were born, as well as the qualities of strength and discretion which are actually inseparable. Born in 1924 in Le Mans, Jean Bouvier studied at the School of Fine Arts and the School of oriental languages in Paris, and assiduously attended various Parisian Academies. In the fifties, after collaborating with the painter Léon Toublanc in the realisation of frescoes, he created stained glass windows.

Although he seldom shows his works, he is a member of the Salon d'Automne and exhibited several times in Parisian galeries, particularly in the renowned galerie Aittouarès in the sixth arrondissement. After his marriage to Anne Campbell, he frequently stayed in England, and travelled and worked around the world, in the USA, Mexico, Spain, Italy and Cambodia. However most of the time, his rural roots connect his works with French landscapes. It is in this category of his paintings that we have made our choices for the exhibition.

His work is always anxious to serve his visual emotion by sober and structured elements of pictorial expression, endeavouring to use the language of colour in an architectural construction of the painting.

SPACECRAFT - A Wildfarm Project, by Patrick Lang, Tina Hulett, Kristopher Moller and Ryan Hattig

For most of the world nature is a place to visit, but at WildFarm nature is home.

So begins the story of Spacecraft, a concept and project that has evolved over the past 20 years at the WildFarm collaborative, a small group of artists, builders, carpenters and visionaries whose mission is to build a beautiful, efficient and sustainable way to live on this planet.

Spacecraft is more than a modular and prefabricated structure concept. It is an extension of WildFarm's exploration of 'building nature.' 

Among our earliest art forms, buildings were fundamentally simple and useful arrangements of sticks, trees, soils, stones, hides, fibers, metals - designed and built to satisfy the human need for shelter against life-threatening elements: weather, wildlife and other human threats. Little has changed.

To build is fundamentally the simple act of placing things near to or adjoining to other things. WildFarm undertakes building with the belief that nature is a model system of efficiency that is inherently self-balancing.  Spacecraft was built with the intent to answer the question of how humans can live most intelligently within the beauty and bounty of the natural world by building habitats that are informed and influenced by natural surroundings. 

Using local and imported technologies, Spacecraft is designed to embody the landscape within which it is placed—where the beauty and integrity of the external environment is carried throughout the structure. Spacecraft is the space where art, craft and engineering come together as part of the pure expression that is home. 

The goal of the WildFarm collaborative is to enable man to live comfortably in nature while ensuring the most creative and innovative uses of all available resources. While some might associate WildFarm with the land art movement, we prefer to consider it more as "land as art" or perhaps "life as art". WildFarm stands for living and building human habitats within nature as an art form.  Our goal is to increase the physical resources of wild land all the while creating picturesque vistas and places to work, relax and reside. 

WildFarm's philosophy is that the surest way to build a successful enterprise is to "find a need and fill it."  

According to Patrick Lang and Tina Hulett, founders of WildFarm, the need is real. "We must understand that we can take care of ourselves and our planet simultaneously, explains Lang. "If I position myself to succeed in synchronicity with nature's long-term potential, nature will be among my greatest allies." Spacecraft embodies that synchronicity as multi-purpose utilitarian habitat with natural beauty as its ultimate purpose.