Twelve Heads - Limited Edition 1 of 4 Print

Many of us see the artist as a bohemian living by his wits and deviancy, on the fringe of society, without spouse or family life, drinking, on drugs, and eating the soles of his shoes. Michel Berberian use to work in advertising, to live in a single family home with wife and children, he has consumed but the minimum of Côtes du Rhône so as not to pass for a killjoy, and uses his soles to walk on. Many see the artist as a backward person, or one who is not in tune with a materialist world, simultaneously with the simplest motivation and the most complicated methods. Michel, however, drives his sedan swiftly, knows how to make a business plan, writes commercial sales blurbs, is installing the latest version of Internet Explorer on his i-Mac and an automatic watering system in his yard. As a matter of fact Michel, as opposed to certain painters or rather, to our views of them, is well adjusted. And yet, he is painting. He paints running men (L'Homme Courant, Man Running, commonplace and oh so current), big birds that fly, lop-sided faces, women rising up. So many people who evolve in the midst of a complex magma of vivacious colours, (Les Mots d'Estomacs, Tummy Words, quadriptych painted on the instructions of a pharmaceutical lab). But if Michel is indeed mastering the complexity of the system, it's clear that he is also suffering from it. In his paintings, the characters have been gnawed-on, are nearly harrowed by the magma, (L'Homme en Colère, the Man in Anger, "not getting indignant equals abdicating"). The running man is in the midst of a bombardment, the heads seem to be irradiated, and the bird appears to be vitrified in flight. Michel attempts to escape himself, in vain: the man is running in a conflagration which extends beyond the painting's frame, the bird is still gliding but another hail of missiles will pull it to pieces, the face has "lost its head;" as it were, and the woman rising up into the air is but a crucified body. It is said that "true art is not decorative" and we tend to think that artists cannot exist without suffering. Michel Berberian expresses a particular kind of suffering: the suffering of the alienation to which we are subjected daily; an alienation which, contrary to dictatorships, is less on our outside than inside of us, such an intimate alienation that it is difficult to express... unless you are an artist. Michel Berberian's paintings, often in big formats, use acrylic and soft lead pencil.