Mireille Binoux – Living Colour (fr/en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Mireille Binoux – Living Colour
Although abandoning the classical pictorial organisation of the canvas, (image) Mireille Binoux retains a keen sense of composition. Her paintings often show still lifes with decentred elements, fragmented urban or rural landscapes, or portraits with faceted depictions of faces. Her pictures reorganize space and its traditional perspective in favour of a planeness of the canvas, in a certain sense as a legacy of cubism. Actually in her work we find the legacy of Cezanne - of the will to simplify and geometricize the shapes in order to produce a two- dimensional effect.
The main element to be gathered from the subtleties of Mireille Binoux’ work, her trademark, is her passion for colour and her very original use of it. Her tableaus are assembled by diverse patches of vivid and opaque colours, with the colours outlining the drawing and not vice versa. At times, the mere chromatic contrast suffices to outline the areas of the image, and a glowing red seems natural next to an indigo blue, in spite of its seeming unreality. At times the artist takes pain to demarcate some colour patches in order to let the shapes emerge in a more articulate way, as we can observe in her portraits. At the same time the arrangement of shapes and the space in function of colour use results in a skilful confusion of shape and background, of foreground and horizon, even of levels of representation. Mireille Binoux loves transforming the nature of the depicted objects: not only by distorting their colour and making the canvas vibrate in a new light but also by deforming these objects. Depending on the angle of view, they are stretched, mirrored or redoubled. The still lifes challenge our modes of perception, the portraits radiate in ironic melancholy.

Mireille Binoux, born Guirand, was born in November 1929 in Nice. She studied fine arts in Nice and Paris, where she counted the painters Bernard Buffet, Ferit Iscan, Pierre Alechinsky and the sculptor César among her friends.

In the post-war period she received numerous awards and exhibited her work in the US and France. Travels to North Africa and Asia, as well as her studies of Egyptology and hieroglyphs were inspiration for many of her works. With her husband, the architect Jaques Binoux and her three children she lived in Bougival near Paris and Challementeau (Bourgogne), the landscapes of these two places being the frequent subject of her paintings.

Of the painters of her generation, she held Camile Hilaire and Antoni Clavé in high esteem, though preferring Matisse and Bonnard - but the greatest influence on her work, and source of inspiration was Cézanne, like herself a native of the South of France. An artist-portrait by CastYourArt. | castyourart.com (written by Colette Angeli and Cem Angeli)

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