‘’Fields of Geological Transition’’ presented at the National Museum of China in Beijing during the 8th Beijing International Art Biennale, China 2019.
This exhibition allowed him to meet the Chinese public again and to represent Switzerland abroad through his art. Bernard was fortunate to have his work exhibited in the Central Hall of the most prestigious National Art Museum of China. He was interview for severals locals programs. The event had more than 500,000 visitors. He does an important press conference for ecology at the symposium. Here a part of his speech :
»I come from a very little country full of beautiful mountains, glaciers and lakes, like in the paradise.
Today we count 1400 glaciers but in less than hundred years, they might all disappear if nothing change with the climate evolution linked with human pollution. What will happen, when we’ll have wasted our last drink water resources?
My lecture of the world is linked with the close environment in which I live.
I usually like to observe the elements, moving with the weather and the seasons.
I admire the beautiful color changes in different lights and moments of the day, on the lake and on the mountains, but always with the conscious of the great danger for who would go to brave them.
Today, I worry for the future generations.
I have to confess, that I am shocked to see the quick evolution of the impact of the climate deregulation on my natural direct environment, increasing the accidents in the mountains, because of unpredictable storms, avalanches, rocks falls, directly related with surprising erosion and unnatural heat, making melting the permafrost, creating torrents of mud pests.
The world will run to his ruin, If we do not all react together now, without differences between cultures and races.
The preservation of the beauty of our mother earth and its resources, is our main universal gift, and should be our principal actual preoccupation.
Contemporary Art is for that reason very important, because it can carry this hope, stimulate to think differently and invite to move and make evolving some consciences. For that reason, I try to make you feel in my large scale paintings, my installations, videos and photographies, our vulnerability in confrontation to the forces of the nature and it’s elements.
I have analyzed the erosion all around the world but mainly in the Alps, the Ural and in China. I always search to observe the invisible movements and transformation of the colorful beauty of some treasures of the nature, with the time and also confronted to the human impact on it.
Also if my art is not only an image, it’s more a rhythm, a dynamic a structure, an energy, part of our unconscious natural human cultural heritage.
I do not care if I do photography, painting, an installation or a performance.
It should be an emotion out of any definition trial, a surprise, an innovation or a resistant act face to indifference.
It’s like a mirror of our society that concern firstly our memory, humanity environment, nature and changes.
I use only natural mineral sediments, asphalt or volcanic sand in my paintings, that I go taking by myself on cliffs or volcano craters, so that my art pieces take part in the history of the evolution of our earth.
It’s important for me, to open my field of perception by keeping always the unconsciousness perpetual movement and evolution in my mind, that concern as well how it was before and how it will be after a few millions of years.
To see like this, through the elements, brings your art in an actuality and oblige you to stay sincere and create not only and aesthetic or decorative object, but a real strong piece of art with a deep philosophical meaning, and a touch of intense beauty with a lot of hope in its roots.
Art is an absolute that stimulate new solutions, more thoughts open to poetry and correspondences.
To be artists is to believe that you can participate in the changes of our world.
My art is born from this pure necessity, and I invite you to follow, by discovering my paintings and transversal conception of art, a poetic journey and reflexion, about the preservation of our beautiful nature and colorful world, and to dream at a better shared future trough the memory of our humanity to cultivate and trough concrete actions. »
Bernard Garo
Bernard Garo Blog 