He was born in western France about forty years ago, in a port, one may guess; he has the rugged face of an adventurer. When, as an adult, he decided that painting would always be at the centre of his life, he understood that for him it would not happen through a school, even the École des Beaux-Arts. He would learn from the great masters, going to museums to examine their masterpieces, attempting, through guessing, to reproduce their techniques. He did not reject the idea of being the natural child of Goya or Soutine; it even suited him to a degree when he found himself to not be good enough. In each painting can be found something of the street fighting he’d experienced. Sometimes he smashes a painting against the wall, tears it, tramples it. His brushstrokes are blows and this violence produces paintings that knock us out. Fredy Bouhier reproduces in each painting a combination of tragedy and enigma that belong only to him, like in his obsession with the Pietà where he changes the figures: a woman’s body in place of Christ’s, the presence of men around this body becoming strange and troublesome, even in their stillness.
Patrick Cady
