The beautiful and simple story of Bram Bogart is the saga of color. Emerging from the anonymity of the tachist and from the gestural calligraphy of graffiti, a style of the informal took shape at the beginning of the 1960s. Like bread dough or more recently polyurethane foam, the pictorial material in Bram Bogart swells and expands, enhancing the raw intensity of the color it wears. The painter’s leaven, his catalyst for catalysis, is the extreme power of physical contraction of the gesture of spreading the palette. As Bogart himself said very well, “the fusion of gesture and matter constitutes the content of the work”.
Assimilating the content of painting with pictorial practice, this is a trendy trend today. Between 1961 and 1963, Bogart’s position was singularly anticipatory. He now appears as the anti-minimal painter by execellence and his materialist option is the pure and simple antithesis of the support-surface postulate. This painting which is only colored matter only refers to itself, it demonstrates nothing, it tells nothing, it testifies to its “being there”: its immanence is pure sensuality.
The retreat of time allows me to appreciate the original contribution of Bram Bogart. He radically freed tachist painting and in general abstract expressionism from its sentimental, narrative and romantic content, in short from all the psychological ambiguity linked to the automatism of gestural writing.
Gesture, color and paste are one. Painting is rigorously reduced to its essence, or if you prefer, reduced to its object: the highlighting of color through matter. The autonomy of the dough from the formal composition or the narrative discourse of the painting is a very old story. What is new here is that matter arises in itself, opposing any other reference than itself. Bram Bogart ends by going beyond it with total objectification, the abundant discourse of high informal pasta. Once and for all, it has reached the point of no return from which painting is nothing but matter, that is to say pure sensuality. What he shows us is the object of painting, the object of painting as an object.
— Pierre Restany