1940-

Bernard Dreyfus was born in Managua, Nicaragua and currently divides his time between Paris and Nicaragua. His art has been seen in selected exhibitions since the early 1970’s.

“The painting of Bernard Dreyfus is disconcerting. Is it painting? Is it not perhaps something else: all profound Art goes beyond the problems of its own expression, painting as well as literature, music as well as architecture, the latter in its masterpieces and its monuments, for example the cathedrals, expresses an entire cosmology. 

Art, therefore, reaches beyond Art. But, philosophy or mathematics does not go beyond philosophy or mathematics. Art alone allows this reaching beyond.

Today, Art is no longer the expression of cosmology. We no longer have a total, exhaustive idea of the universe and of ourselves, of our presence here below, and of our ultimate end. Art, in this case Bernard Dreyfus’ painting, can only have fugitive and rather desperate visions of this world. What do we see? Kinds of silhouettes, kinds of beings, fairly numerous, who appear to be human, lost in a black or white vastness, a vastness of canvas, the immensity of this universe which is at the same time dense and inconsistent, disturbing, like an impenetrable mystery.

I like Bernard Dreyfus, because his painting is not a simple problem of colors, of pictorial technique, but because it is interrogation of the enigma.”

- Eugène Ionesco for de l’Académie Française