In 1955, Bernard Réquichot placed charred earth and plants in a small, charred wooden box: this was his first Reliquaire, which he titled La Tombe de la nature.¹Bernard Réquichot, La Tombe de la nature, 1955, agglomerate of charred earth and charred wooden box, 20 x 15 x 10 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, inv. AM 2017-720.  The box was small and not deep, nor was it characterised by the profusion of materials and colours of his later Reliquaires,²Between 1955 and 1961, Bernard Réquichot created at least 16 Reliquaires, listed in the catalogue raisonné by BARTHES, Roland; BILLOT, Marcel; PACQUEMENT, Alfred, Bernard Réquichot (Brussels: La Connaissance, 1973). which continually grew in complexity, like living organisms. In keeping with the irrepressible growth of nature, the Reliquaire des rencontres de campagne is one of Réquichot’s most accomplished reliquaries. Its restoration in 2021 offered the chance to analyse its structure and identify some of its mysterious contents. Most of the objects examined were of natural, organic origin (bones, pheasant feathers, snail shells, wood, bark, paper), with the notable exception of a piece of terracotta and three shoes.³La Maison du manège endormi, a Reliquaire from 1958–59, also contains a shoe. Conceptually, this reliquary is very similar to the Reliquaire des rencontres de campagne, with objects suspended on nylon threads and painted canvas reused to line the bottom and sides of the box. The work, which was also in the Daniel Cordier Collection, is held by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, inv. AM 1989-478. These assorted contents are positioned as shown in the diagram below, drawn by the restorer, Alexia Soldano (fig. 1). The report on her intervention⁴Alexia Soldano’s report was compiled following the work’s restoration between October 2020 and April 2021 in her studio at 33 Avenue Faidherbe, Montreuil. I thank Alexia Soldano for the extensive documentation she produced, on which the descriptive part of this study is founded. describes the different ways in which the objects were fixed in place – by screws and bits of wire and string – visible on the back of the hardboard panel used to form the bottom of the wooden box. An element in canvas and papier-mâché is suspended at the front of the glass-fronted box by nylon threads (fig. 1, no. 10). Like the other elements in the Reliquaire, it is covered with oil paint squeezed directly from the colour tube, or spread using a piston pump that Bernard Réquichot first repurposed in 1956. Applied in this way, the colours – which are mainly blue, red and white – did not become mixed but form thick twisting filaments that encompass anything they came into contact with. Numerous concretions arising from the excess paint bound together the various objects trapped in their coating of paint. 

The art of the agglomerate

Only two elements in the Reliquaire are not embraced by paint: the pheasant feathers and snail shells, though several of the latter are painted blue. All the others – natural remnants or discarded manufactured goods, such as the shoes – are mired in a thick layer of three pigments, “that initially gives the impression of a box full of paint”. Alfred Pacquement adds: “It’s only after a careful look that certain objects can be made out beneath the paint”.⁵PACQUEMENT, Alfred, “Réquichot et la Forme”, in Bernard Réquichot (Brussels: La Connaissance, 1973), p. 184.  The paint can be considered as being either a protective coating or, conversely, as a destructive gastric juice. In both cases, the remorseless interment of the objects beneath the accumulation of paint conceals their original identity. “So, it is not an object’s form that interests Réquichot”, concludes Pacquement, “but the forms that this object will allow him to realize”.⁶Idem. This consubstantial inversion also affects the positions of the forms in the box, in keeping with an approach common to all the Reliquaires. By effacing the objects’ material reality in this manner, Réquichot elaborated a visual language “that seems to have no aim other than to provoke a form of visual exasperation”. This phenomenon, described by Henry-Claude Cousseau, may stimulate “a vertigo that is nothing but a perception formed inside his body”.⁷COUSSEAU, Henry-Claude, Bernard Réquichot (1929-1961), Rétrospective, exh. cat. [Les Sables-d’Olonne, Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte Croix, 26.03 – 10.05.1977] (Les Sables d'Olonne: MASC - Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, 1977), n.p. This interpretation leads on from Roland Barthes’ pioneering analysis that “Réquichot only paints his own body: not the external body that the painter copies by looking obliquely at himself, but his body seen from the inside”.⁸BARTHES, Roland, “Réquichot et son corps”, in Bernard Réquichot, op. cit., p. 11.The philosopher, who compared the Reliquaires to “endoscopic machines”,⁹Ibid., p. 12. wondered whether the works weren’t in fact “stomachs open” on the artist’s “internal magma”,¹⁰Idem. by which he was referring to Bernard Réquichot’s entrails. This “aesthetics of the vision” was countered in the artist by a “metaphysics of secrecy”,¹¹Idem. which would explain why he was loath to show his paintings.

Did Bernard Réquichot fear the public’s brazen gaze on “his body seen from the inside”? The artist may have feared this; after all, Roland Barthes reminds us that “the fundamental form of repugnance is the agglomerate”.¹²Ibid., p. 13. To illustrate this, Barthes used the artist’s collages, which Réquichot called his Papiers choisis. In the one belonging to the Foundation (fig. 2), Réquichot agglomerated the motif of a dog whose image he cut out of a magazine, multiplying the number of images by procuring several copies of the magazine. “Yet, according to Roland Barthes, it seems that the conglomerate of beasts provokes in us the paroxysm of repugnance: teeming worms, tangles of snakes, nests of wasps”.¹³Idem. For the art critic Julien Alvard, Réquichot’s clusters of scraps of animals betray “a striking respiratory anguish”,¹⁴ALVARD, Julien, Bernard Réquichot (1929-1961), extract from Cimaise (March 1962), quoted in Bernard Réquichot, exh. cat. [Geneva, Galerie Krugier & Cie, n.d.] (Geneva: Galerie Krugier & Cie, suite no. 30, 1970), n.p. which may have been related to his suicide.

The aesthetic of found objects

The presence of several shoes among the objects identified in the Reliquaire inevitably provides a link with one of Bernard Réquichot’s earliest works, featuring a well-worn shoe without a shoelace.¹⁵No. 18, p. 192 of the catalogue raisonné (Brussels, 1973); the work was discussed by Roland Barthes, p. 17. This youthful drawing, from about 1949, marked the start of “a long epic of waste”, which Barthes considered came from the “surroundings of farms”, where Réquichot’s preferred scraps accumulate: “bones from chickens and rabbits, poultry feathers, everything that came to him from his ‘rencontres de campagnes’”.¹⁶BARTHES, R., op. cit., p. 17. The Montenegrin artist Dado (1933–2010) was a frequent partner in Réquichot’s rural object-hunting. Near his new studio in Hérouval (Oise), which Dado occupied from 1960 onwards, there was a knacker’s yard the pair took great delight in, collecting bones from “pyramids of dead animals”¹⁷PACQUEMENT, Alfred, “Leçon d’anatomie”, in Dado et Bernard Réquichot, La guerre des nerfs, exh. cat. [Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, 22.02 – 26.05.2002] (Toulouse: Les Abattoirs, 2002), p. 10. to garnish their respective works.

Regarding how he collected the objects in his Reliquaires, Bernard Réquichot commented as follows: “(...) when I reach home, something is often missing, and this absence blights my entire collection. I look for what I’m lacking and why things can suddenly turn out well or badly. I look for what I have left in a field or on a road, and I find that what is lacking is not a pebble or a tree, but the circumstance of me seeing them, the rhythm of the walk, my distraction taken by surprise at its discovery, the turn of thought, the state, the moment”.¹⁸RÉQUICHOT, Bernard, “Métaplastique”, in BILLOT, Marcel, Les écrits de Bernard Réquichot (Brussels: La Connaissance, 1973), p. 87.  Thus, once they have been placed in his Reliquaires, Réquichot’s found objects only exist through the thoughts and feelings the artist experienced at the moment of their discovery. The values that defined them in their physical and natural state were immediately replaced by a symbolic and a poetic import, as if the Reliquaires had the power to crystallise (beneath the camouflage of the paint) a short-lived moment, like an “encounter” (rencontre) in fact. In this, they have close affinities with the Tableaux-pièges created by Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930). When Spoerri encases the remains of a meal in glue (fig. 3), “his aim is not to produce a work of art in the classical sense, but to take possession of a particular moment”.¹⁹LUCIE-SMITH, Edward, L’Art d’Aujourd’hui (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1977), p. 178.

In spite of their singular nature, the Reliquaires – like the Rencontres de campagne – share the same “aesthetic of found objects”²⁰“L’esthétique de la trouvaille”, in GIROUS, Michel, “Réquichot, trouver le temps, l’espace”, in Dado et Bernard Réquichot, La guerre des nerfs, exh. cat. [Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, 22.02 – 26.05.2002] (Toulouse: Les Abattoirs, 2002), p. 38.  with the works of other artist-assemblers, such as his friends Dado and Yolande Fièvre (1907–1983). Fièvre also collected stones and driftwood from nature, with which she built “little theatres” in the early 1960s. Like her work Le Festival de l’assassin²¹LAFONTAINE, Adeline, “Yolande Fièvre ou l’art de ressusciter la matière (FGA-BA-FIEVR-0001)” [Œuvre du mois], Geneva, Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, 2022. (fig. 4), she organised them in a spatially structured and studied presentation that the Reliquaires eschewed. Conversely, in common with the Reliquaires, the repetition and accumulation of found objects finishes by “making us forget the original image of the elements and giving us a more abstract, mysterious perception of them”.²²MEYER-ABBATUCCI, Valérie, “Hommage à Bernard Réquichot” (sheet), in AJAC, Béatrice (ed.), Daniel Cordier, le regard d’un amateur (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2005), p. 158. Bernard Réquichot’s suicide deeply affected Yolande Fièvre, who recalled having discovered in his Reliquaires several unusual objects she had given him.²³SEBBAG, Georges; THORAVAL, Charlotte, Yolande Fièvre, exh. cat. [Paris, Halle Saint Pierre, 17.09.2008 – 08.03.2008] (Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 2008), p. 102. To help deal with her grief at his death, in winter 1962 she created a large triptych that she called Hommage à Bernard Réquichot ou Rêve pour un jeune mort.²⁴Yolande Fièvre, Hommage à Bernard Réquichot, driftwood, stones, bones, metal, shells, shards [1961]; Paris, Centre Pompidou collection, inv. AM 1989-327, on deposit at the Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse. She commented, “The essence of this work lies in the decomposition of its materials, which, by means of their arrangement, reconstitute Bernard Réquichot’s inner world”.²⁵MEYER-ABBATUCCI, V., op. cit., p. 158. In this attempt at a posthumous portrait, Yolande Fièvre approached as close as she was able the truth of the Reliquaires that Daniel Cordier (1920–2020), Réquichot’s friend and dealer, understood as being “pieces of life lived”.²⁶CORDIER, Daniel, taken from the radio broadcast Une vie une œuvre : La vie rêvée de Daniel Cordier - Bernard Réquichot, episode 9, presented by Blandine Masson and recorded in the France Culture studios on 2 June 1994.

Painting’s graveyard

The use of objects was one of the innovative developments in twentieth-century art. Bernard Réquichot embraced this means of constructing a work of art as part of the desacralisation of painting that his Cubist, Dadaist and then Surrealist predecessors had already begun. In contrast, no one before him had treated the medium so harshly. Never had this “mania to overpaint” ²⁷ABADIE, Daniel, “La continuité perdue de Bernard Réquichot”, in Bernard Réquichot (1929-1921), Rétrospective, exh. cat., op. cit., n.p. objects been taken to such a degree. To Daniel Abadie, it suggests “a drama of materiality”²⁸Idem. that reveals a paradox of confliction in the creator of the Reliquaires. While his work contributed to the “agony of painting”,²⁹BARTHES, R., op. cit., p. 26. to quote Roland Barthes, Réquichot “goes to the point of frenzy to intensify its material and spatial potential”.³⁰BRIEND, Christian, “La peinture absolument”, in Bernard Réquichot “Je n’ai jamais commencé à peindre”, exh. cat. [Paris, Centre Pompidou, 03.04 – 02.09.2024] (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2024), p. 14. Behind this creative madness, death is lurking. It crouches in the darkness of the Reliquaires. In their visible aspect, “they reveal Réquichot’s inner shadows, his anxiety, his anguish, the nightmares that troubled his conscious mind and pushed him towards death”.³¹JOUFFROY, Alain, “Dado et Réquichot : deux comètes”, in Dado et Bernard Réquichot, La guerre des nerfs, exh. cat., op. cit., p. 18. On 4 December 1961, the artist ended his life by throwing himself from his flat window. This definitive act took place two days before his second solo exhibition at the Daniel Cordier gallery. To this “precocious genius who fell from the sky”, his dealer devoted a last retrospective before the gallery permanently closed its doors in July 1964. Jean Moulin’s secretary, who kept the Reliquaire des rencontres de campagne close to him, long wondered whether Réquichot – “my friend forever present” – might not revisit our souls to help us decipher the Reliquaires, those “poems to the glory of nature and death”.³²CORDIER, Daniel, Daniel Cordier présente 8 ans d’agitation : 8 Rue de Duras, 8 Rue de Miromesnil, Paris 8 : 1956-1964, exh. cat. [Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1964] (Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1964), p. 41.

Bertrand Dumas
Curator of the Fine Arts Collection
Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, november 2024

Close-ups on the Reliquaire des rencontres de campagne