In Bram Bogart’s paintings the colour identifies itself with the doughlike matter. The dualism of colour and substance form the whole of the work: its content and its significance, its impact and its limits. Colour is used in an absolute manner, its tone is unique as is the field on which it is applied.
This field often blends in the superficies of the whole painting, sometimes it contains different portions of contrasting or harmonising colour.
The presence of colour in Bogart’s work, albeit so strong, does not only appeal to our latent subconscious sense of colour, it is also more than a confirmation, limited, for example, by a measured unity of 80 cm x 80 cm, of the existence of blue or red. Abstraction does not extend as far in any other work of art where the plastic problems are reduced to their component parts.
It is, however, true that in the work of the American, Elsworth Kelly, for example, the existence of colours, their impact, their reciprocal action is detached to the maximum by the concrete presence of colour on the canvas. If in this very defined case we can talk of an abstraction of colour, in Bogart’s work, on the other hand, there is a concretion of colour. Its presence flows from the saturation of abounding matter — a kind of lava of paint, ciment and jute — from the pigment.
By the material representation of colours Bogart continues to show his evident preference, with him always, for a clear statement in plastic. Above all, the choice of colours (and the primary contrasts) respond to the exigencies which he demands of his pictures: to separate serenity and tension.
With his material too, he dominates the form: he scoops and kneads his models on geometric shapes. In the last few years their presence is underlined by a larger liberty and variety, especially in the large works, by a well-developed sense of the voluptuous or the masterly. To call Bogart’s works “pictures” makes lass and less sense as the colour and the substance gradually identify themselves the one to the other.
Of course he always works from this rudimentary basis of the picture : the surface area which, without any doubt, determines the limits of his work.
But I think of these limits more as a field of tension stretched to extremes, than as an outline that leans towards the middle or as a decisive definition.
The picture has become a work destined to be seen as a concrete object without precise references and without thought-provoking implications.