“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.”
—Ann Bremner in the exhibition publication for Paul-Henri Bourguignon: A Retrospective, 1906–1988 The Schumacher Gallery, Capital University, Columbus, Ohio, 1989