BERNARD JARDEL, OPTICAL SURREALISM

Bernard Jardel, the Optical Surrealist painter

Bernard Jardel (1932-1984)

Born in 1932 in Paris, Bernard Jardel was a prominent figure in the abstract and optical art scene of the 1970s. Trained as an architect at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he merged technical rigor with artistic creativity. Although he worked as the commercial director for the family business, Ateliers de Construction Schwartz-Haumont, Jardel pursued a dual career by dedicating himself to painting with an intensity that left a lasting impact. This dual life, split between the industrial world and the art world, enriched his approach and defined his unique style, a style that led Victor Vasarely, the master of optical art, to label his work as “optical surrealism”.

 

A Unique Style at the Intersection of Architecture and Painting

Jardel’s work is defined by a distinctive visual language, where geometry and color play a central role. His background in architecture equipped him with a keen sense of structure, perspective, and light manipulation, which he translated into his compositions. His works revolve around repetitive geometric forms, creating kaleidoscopic effects and fascinating illusions of depth. Each canvas invites viewers into a world of “fantastic labyrinths”, as the press described them, where light and color interact to reveal unexpected perspectives. Jardel firmly rejected the use of mechanical processes, favoring a purely handcrafted approach. His work, influenced by Bauhaus principles, diverges by emphasizing the human and sensitive aspects of each piece, created with an uncompromising dedication to his craft.

 

Artistic Recognition and Prestigious Exhibitions

Jardel’s career took off in the 1970s, when he began exhibiting regularly in France and internationally. His works garnered the attention of prestigious Parisian galleries and influential collectors. In 1971, he exhibited alongside Yvaral (Jean-Pierre Vasarely), the son of Victor Vasarely, in Saint-Tropez, where they explored “the fascinating world of pure research” in art. In 1975, his first exhibition in Brussels at Galerie Govaerts was well received by critics, who praised his use of geometry and color in service of painting. Jardel also exhibited in Japan, including in Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Osaka, solidifying his international reputation.

In Paris, he showcased his work at renowned salons such as the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui, where his pieces stood out for their visual impact and technical precision. Jardel became a prominent figure in abstract art, pushing the boundaries of optical perception and transforming shapes into living entities. Audiences at each exhibition were captivated by the complexity and depth of his work, which blended abstraction and realism in a play of perception and perspective.

 

Acclaimed by the Press

Jardel’s work captured the media’s attention, earning coverage in various art and finance publications. His paintings were regularly featured in renowned journals and magazines such as Paris Match, Le Revenu Français, and Jours de France. These publications celebrated his unique vision and artistic dedication. Known as the “brush of the rich” due to the elegance of his work, his creations appealed to high-profile art collectors and figures from the business and cultural spheres, including Louis Ducatel, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Alain Delon. Jardel’s artworks, exhibited alongside pieces by other celebrated artists, managed to stand out through their distinctive character and powerful aesthetic.

 

A Masterful Technique and Subtle Palette

Jardel mainly worked with acrylic on large canvases, using a subtle palette of cool blues, browns, and purples. This color choice reinforced the optical effect and enhanced the contrast between geometric shapes, playing with viewers’ perceptions. His meticulous approach allowed him to convey emotion, even within abstract compositions. Each piece was a study of light, volume, and texture, where every line and color was carefully chosen to create visual harmony.

 

An Artistic Legacy Continued Through Remastering

Although Bernard Jardel passed away in 1984, his artistic legacy lives on. His son Alecse, also an artist and founder of the Myretroposter gallery, has undertaken the remastering of some of his works to make them accessible to a new generation of art lovers and design enthusiasts. These re-editions help preserve Jardel’s vision and celebrate the timeless quality of his creations. Myretroposter will soon offer these iconic pieces, true treasures of abstract art, allowing a broader audience to rediscover the world of Bernard Jardel—a world where geometric rigor meets fascinating optical effects.

This remastering project gives Bernard Jardel a renewed presence, bringing his works to a global audience and extending the memory of an artist whose contributions to abstract and optical art remain invaluable.

Interview by Leone de Grandville

« In order to paint a portrait of a bird, first draw an open
cage»... advises Jacques Prévert in one of his most beautiful poems. And, to portray an artist, should one
take him by surprise? One day, if you happen to meet Bernard Jardel the business man, would you believe that he is the artist Bernard Jardel? The oneirical dimensions, the disconcerting perspectives which haunt the imagination of the artist Jardel, spring from simple but tasteful surroundings, of Jardel the businessman, where all seems peaceful and harmonious. His black glittering eyes withold he secret.

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Bernard Jardel in his office

Thérèse de St Phalle: The Double Life of Bernard Jardel

Could one be an artist exhibiting at Tokyo, Nagoya, Houston, Beirut, Madrid, paint more than sixty canvases a year, while holding the responsibilities of an enterprise?

It's a challenge which Bernard Jardel, 40, takes up, whose exhibition opens on the 15th of March at Brussels. His paintings, severely constructed, makes the waves of trapezes converge towards an objective.
If his paintings are bought by an Oriental as well as by an European collector, it is because they evoque the sentiment of ”Odyssey of the Space", a flight towards the infinite by a series of perpectives. A circle vibrates, vertical blades across it, the hues of which indicates the diffraction of the light. A style which is unique and doesn't have the slightest resemblance to any other. Without signature on his paintings, one still recognises the style of Jardel.

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Bernard Jardel by Gerald Schurr

In the presence of Bernard Jardel's work, an attentive spectator is bewitched by its fundamental ambiguity which animates the fixed surface, accentuates the masterly depths, which however avoids illusion, yielding to the ordonnance of the two dimensions, underlining it with determination.
«When | stain my canvas, it immediately becomes round, rectangular, or triangle». His education as an architect, has marked Jardel deeply, and it is precisely this «discipline» which inspires his geometrical themes, this draws attention to his decorative aspect, seldom acknowledged, which governs his
compositions- and the importance he attaches to his experimental research.There is something rustic which mingles with this visual magic, for example in the utilisation of acrylic paints, or the repercussion of the war like apparatus as "pistols" and "bombs" (sprays).

The delicately shaded and mesured tones, gamut of vivid and cold colours of an amplified. subtle intensity: thus does Jardel set fotrh his tempo and his energetic forms, composes his kaleidoscope, harmonises the depth and relief to this harmony of trapezoidal and spherical forms. If the encounter of the structures sometimes enclosed in a concentric circle or overflowing it, disrupts the traditional space, the « muralness» of the structure is always respected.

The expression « optical surrealism» pronounced in connection of the fantastic labyrinths conceived by Jardel seems extremely well received. One thinks of Baudelaire, « this unexpected element, the quaintness of which is like a condiment absolutely indispensable to all beauty». Thus invited to participate and penetrate in an. abstract space devoid of all unwieldiness, the amateur notices that the net-work of lines, these motifs perspectives which clash against each other, breaks open the domain of the inexplicable. It is geometry at the sevice of the imagination which opens the way to irrational poetry.


Gerald Schurr

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