The exhibition is curated by Florian Rodari, honorary curator and director of the Fondation Jean et Suzanne Planque, Maïlis Favre, curator, and Isabelle and Caroline Bissière, the artist’s granddaughters.

From September 16, 2023 to January 14, 2024, at the Chapelle des Pénitents blancs-Granet XXe, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence presents an exhibition prepared in partnership with the Fondation Jean et Suzanne Planque as part of the deposit of its collections with the Aix institution.

The exhibition is devoted to the “Journal en images” painted between 1962 and 1964, during the last two years of his life, by French artist Roger Bissière (b. 1886). Composed of numerous small paintings, dated on the day they were made, this work is dedicated to the memory of his wife. She was first his model, then the subject of his paintings. From the mid-1940s onwards, she also participated in the “making” of the work, sewing and embroidering hangings made from applied fabrics. When she died suddenly on October 13, 1962, the woman nicknamed “Mousse” became the object and raison d’être of this series.

His death left Roger Bissière devastated. But he soon returned to his studio. “As an apple tree makes apples”, the painter was to create, with his brushes and a few felt-tips, an impressive series of 152 paintings in which he portrayed the daily life around him. Over the course of 780 days, he created these small compositions on wooden boards placed on his knees, dated from day to day. He doesn’t describe the world, but seeks to recreate, through the colors and rhythms of his brush, the freshness of the woods, the incandescence of fire, the lightness of a spring day, the heat of summer at midday in the Lot or the darkness of night.

Immersed in this nature and country he adores, he recounts its germinating life, its perpetual rebirth. These images are thus a projection of himself, in search of a spiritual communion with those who contemplate them. He paints “to be less alone in this miserable world” and to reach out beyond space and time to other men.

The exhibition, conceived in close collaboration with the artist’s family, presents a selection of 47 of these paintings, many of them previously unseen.