“The light of Paris, the exoticism of Spain, North Africa, and Yugoslavia, all aroused the painter’s curiosity, his senses, and his keen capacity for observation. Memories of these regions, reworked and transmuted, recurred in his paintings for the rest of his life.”

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“Far from being realist portraits, [Bourguignon’s faces] are reductive forms, often imbued with a patchwork of layered textures and colors and with simply rendered lines of brushwork to indicate, with the barest possible detail… In Bourguignon’s portraits, what reads as primitivism may instead be simply a kind of pure expression that naturally lends itself to his unsentimental and uncomplicated vision. The colors of the faces themselves recall the intensity of Fauvist imagery.”

Michael Abatemarco,
“Faces in the Crowd: Paul Henri Bourguignon”
Pasatiempo, arts publication
of the Santa Fe New Mexican,
February 14, 2014

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“Sometimes forms (usually figurative) push their way to our eyes as if carved out from the dense ground. Other times a thin line of white describes a surface pattern that just might resolve into a suggestive image. In these works the observation/stylization balance reverses, but the artist’s means are just as economical. He reveals enough clues for our observing eyes to recognize a stylized shape as a profile or a figure in motion.”

Ann Bremner,
Exhibition publication,
Paul-Henri Bourguignon: A Retrospective,
Schumacher Gallery, Capital University,
Columbus, Ohio, 1989

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“The absorption and permeability of his painting contain diverse histories and cultures and urge us to break down such abstract distinctions as developed/underdeveloped, civilized/primitive, historic/ prehistoric, all of which oversimplify the nature of the encounter between the West and the rest of the world.”

Joan Dayan
“The Craft of Memory: Bourguignon’s Haitian Paintings”
in Paul-Henri Bourguignon: The Haitian Works, 
Gallery V exhibition publication, 1996

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“The paintings create seemingly vast and deep expanses, punctuated by surface accents of linear and textural patterning. At once intimate and monumental, [these compositions] often relinquish all descriptive associations. To Bourguignon, however, the paintings never became fully abstract; he preferred to see them as filled with multivalent references, there waiting to be found.”

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“In the 1980s, Paul began carving unique and whimsical heads and figures from solid backgrounds [later, labeled “Wonderheads”]. Similar to Michaelangelo, Paul had a piece of stone and brought out what was inside.”

—Erika Bourguignon

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“The paintings create seemingly vast and deep expanses, punctuated by surface accents of linear and textural patterning. At once intimate and monumental, [these compositions] often relinquish all descriptive associations. To Bourguignon, however, the paintings never became fully abstract; he preferred to see them as filled with multivalent references, there waiting to be found.”

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Bourguignon’s artwork can be found in public and private collections in more than three dozen states in the U.S. and two dozen countries throughout the world.

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