BUFFET Bernard - Original lithograph "Café Restaurant in Roger" 58x76cm - 1985

This original lithograph of Bernard Buffet, carried out in 1985 and entitled Roger Restaurant Café, Fully fits into the immediately recognizable graphic universe of the artist. Through this typical French street scene, buffet deploys its rigorous pictorial language, made of incisive lines, contrasts and frank colors that structure space with great expressive strength.

The yellow facade of the restaurant café, hosted by the "coffee tobacco" and "restaurant" inscriptions, immediately captures the look. It comes out with intense blue sky, traveled with black lines removing electric wires and air movement. The composition is based on a slightly fuying perspective that guides the eye to the backgrounds, accentuating the solitude and silence specific to many urban scenes from Bernard Buffet. Trees with bare branches, treated with almost nervous gestures, reinforce this atmosphere both familiar and melancholy.

Buffet does not seek to beautify the real, but to reveal the frame. The thick black lines identify the forms, give an almost sculptural architecture to buildings and reflect a sober, sometimes austere, daily landscape. Yet the use of bright colors, especially this bright yellow and these keys of green in the planters, brings a subtle balance between rigor and vitality.

Printed on vellum paper in a generous format of 58 x 76 cm, this lithography testifies to the perfect technical mastery of the artist in the art of the print. This is an artist, numbered and pencil test by Bernard Buffet, which gives it a particularly sought-after character. The work is also referenced in the artist's reasoned catalog, Volume 2, under number 464, pledge of its authenticity and importance in the graphic buffet production. It is accompanied by certification, guaranteeing its origin and its traceability.

Through Roger Restaurant Café, Bernard Buffet immortalizes a fragment of ordinary life, turned through his look into a timeless scene. This work perfectly illustrates its attachment to simple urban landscapes, with modest architectures and this daily France that it has represented throughout its career. It will seduce both the lovers of the buffet work as those sensitive to a strong, structured and deeply human vision of the landscape.

This original lithograph is a high quality piece, both iconic of Bernard Buffet's style and representative of its graphic work of the 1980s, particularly rich period in its production of prints. It naturally finds its place in a collection devoted to French modern art or the singular universe of one of the major artists of the twentieth century.