The Work Beyond

Barande believes his life is the extension of a death that has already occurred and that his works are the remnants of a previous existence, leading to the creation of a world of miniature forms and figures as well as monumental canvases situated between abstraction and figuration.

As David Galloway writes: “The tomb comprised the most central sign, symbol and metaphor in the artist’s philosophy… a pure, transfigured space where time itself is transfigured. A unique destination that accommodates all the entities of the world and their objects, in order to dismantle them. An ‘elsewhere’ conceived as a heaven for objects, where they associate freely and their combination is no longer fragmentary, but a natural state.

“The objects have one aspect in common: what holds them together can also separate them, exclude them, or make them harmonise with each other. They have an infinite number of combinations.”

For 50 years, Barande kept his work private. He finally accepted to show a collection organised in diptychs for the first time at Mamco, in Geneva, in 2008. He renewed the experience with the exhibition Nice to be Dead at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011. The American curator and critic David Galloway persuaded him to organise a more ambitious show, and a large collection of paintings was exhibited under the title The Work Beyond at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2016.

The Work Beyond is the subject of this catalogue, which shows more than 200 sculptures and paintings. Here, the amazing breadth and sequential nature of Barande’s work is reflected in the book’s design: each of the book’s 4,000 copies features a unique combination of elements derived from Barande’s paintings on the cover.