The BAROTTE MADAU Endowment Fund has been set up in France as a result of the artistic meeting and the long relationship between the painter Jean-Marie Barotte and Maria Cristina Madau, an interdisciplinary artist, along with the support of a group of personalities from the artistic, cultural and scientific world, close to these artists and highly committed to this project. Underlying this artistic meeting is a long path of joint research, based on a dialogue fuelled by an alternation between the two roles of artist and witness, one being an inspiration for the other.
Barotte and Madau have grown together through an incessant dialogue demanding the best from each other while leaving no room for consensus; a dialogue aimed at overcoming fears and hardships, moments of discouragement and artistic crises of life. Today the BM Fund transmits the testimony of an experience of artistic research free from any type of conditioning, thus setting the stage for intellectual and artistic planning and exchange. In order to pass on this method of experimentation, Maria Cristina Madau is continuing this research through the Fund, setting the way to the valorisation of the work of Jean-Marie Barotte and creating the opportunity for new collaborations with artists and researchers.
During 30 years of life together, based on deep mutual esteem and respect, these two artists were able to enhance the potential and strength of their union becoming one the companion of the other in their personal artistic paths, finding their homeplace in each other’s soul. The testimony of this life journey is visible today in what has been achieved and in what is yet to be achieved, since the death of one of the two travellers, Jean-Marie Barotte, has not interrupted this singular and fruitful dialogue.
The choice of the 2004 pictorial work Passage de l’âme by Jean-Marie Barotte is the expression of the spirit of the BM Fund insofar as it summarises the new starting point of this magnificent artistic adventure.
To give shape to his thought, Barotte initially tries his hand at theatrical practice, eventually ending up dedicating himself entirely to visual investigation when theatre no longer meets his expressive needs. This will lead him to express himself mainly through painting over the years. Literature and philosophy are the tools that accompany him through his artistic path: the connections to Edmond Jabès’s literary work, Paul Celan’s poetic work, San Juan de la Cruz’s spiritual path, Jacques Derrida’s philosophical work, inspire the artist towards a continuous philosophical-pictorial narrative. His work testifies the violence required to express the concept of the sublime. In his formal compositions Jean-Marie Barotte opens a breach towards a vision, but he does so through what the matter refers to/reveals, rather than through its three-dimensionality, towards contemplation.
Passage de l’âme formally enunciates the fertile collaboration with his partner, the woman who has constantly spurred him -e.g. to tackle new research topics shared by the two of them-, the woman who has always encouraged him to the use of supports and formats he was not very used to. Barotte masterfully faces these new challenges with his unparalleled style. He creates this work with an alchemical technique consisting of combustion-smoke sedimentations.
Passage de l’âme expresses the completeness of the two partners’ meeting with extraordinary simplicity and essentiality. These stratified sedimentations refer to the time of sympathy; they draw a sublime dance between emptiness and fullness, light and shadows, human and divine, towards the infinite.
Created in the artist’s Monvalle atelier (on Lake Maggiore), this work was exhibited for the first time in one of his solo exhibitions in the Onde exhibition venue in Velizy-Villacoublay (Paris), on the occasion of the Saloméshow production directed by MCMadau, for which Barotte gave his contribution signing the stage works of the scenography.