Norma Bessières is an artist who, like a wildlife Buren, has chosen the zebra as her only subject.

Why zebras?

Because their natural formal characteristics make them a perfect subject for questioning art. Does art originate from nature or is it a symbolic human invention?

Having examined that observation from multiple angles in a diverse array of paintings over a period of about ten years, Norma Bessières now entirely focuses on the crux of her inquiry: the inanimate and the living.

How can the relationship between the zebra as a living being and the geometric abstraction induced by its features be expressed with a painter’s intrinsically artificial means of depicting the living? This underlies the varied array of interpretations in the series Ruptures. It encourages viewers to reconsider the correlation between inanimate objects and symbols as well as the pictorial idea of the zebra in many unsettling compositions.

The Ouvertures paintings explore movement and the present moment with zebras appearing confined by barcodes. Their indeterminate state (geometrical or alive?) constitutes an ode to our own attempts at escaping the digitization of our lives.