Eric Bari (1963) Saint-front Cathedral, Périgueux, Dordogne

Éric BARI
(born in 1963)
The forecourt of Saint-Front Cathedral - Périgueux
Oil on canvas
H. 38 cm; W. 46 cm
Signed lower right

Eric Bari is a leading French painter, notably recognized as an Official Painter of the Armed Forces (Army, Air Force, and Navy)—an honorary distinction that allows him to artistically depict military life and contemporary operations. He is a graduate of the École nationale des arts appliqués Duperré in Paris, took fresco courses at the Beaux-Arts, and studied under the painter Philippe Lejeune, which gave him a solid academic foundation combined with a very distinct personal style.

His work, widely exhibited in art fairs and galleries since the late 1980s, illustrates both his technical skill and his keen eye, as he tackles all kinds of subjects. Bari is described as an artist who wields brushes with great virtuosity, imbuing each canvas with a rich texture where the interplay of light and shadow lends a sensual presence to the subjects he paints.

Beyond his institutional role, his work lies at the intersection of the figurative and the sensory: whether depicting military subjects, urban landscapes, Mediterranean vistas, still lifes, or portraits, Bari places color at the center of his work.
As a passionate artist and teacher, he brings a keen and human perspective to his daily work, making painting and drawing accessible to everyone. Between his various stops and the classes he teaches, he has treated us to a respite in the Périgord and twenty-five paintings that take us on a journey through our own region.

This view of Saint-Front Cathedral—which many artists have sketched—serves here as a testament to the evolution of the cathedral square over the decades and under successive municipal administrations.

The artist’s perspective:

“I created this series of paintings by alternating between working from life and working from my photographs. But it all begins outdoors. You have to walk, return, wait. Live within a landscape before painting it. It is through this presence that its rhythm, its light, and its silent history—what makes it irreducibly unique—gradually reveal themselves.

The studio is not a place of reproduction; it is a place of memory. What remains after the experience of the landscape is transformed there. Painting does not seek to capture reality, but to recapture its intensity. It moves away from the visible to reach a more inner truth, where observation and memory intertwine.

I have chosen to paint a few iconic sites in the Périgord. Others before me have looked at them, painted them, loved them. Their presence is not a model but a memory.

Each gaze renews the landscape, just as each era reveals a different light. I seek to escape the conventional image. What matters to me lies in the relationships between forms, the tension of colors, the flow of light, the thickness of the brushstroke, and the spirit of the composition. It is there that, slowly, a pictorial language is built, where the landscape becomes less a subject than a space for painting.

At a time when images flash by without lasting, painting preserves the extended duration of the gaze. It remains an act of presence. It still allows us, it seems to me, to inhabit the world with attention and to convey a sensory experience of it.

This exhibition was born from an encounter. From the friendship and trust of Florent Piednoir, and from our exchanges over the months, a shared project was born. I see it less as the culmination of a commission than as proof that a dialogue between people, a territory, and painting can still give rise to a shared work.”