... Since 1994, Bernard Alligand had regularly produced ceramics. But it was especially in 2003 that he devoted an important part of his creative activity to them, to the point of qualifying himself this year: the year of ceramics . This is to say how much, for him, this activity counted. During this decade (1994-2003), his ceramics had followed a path parallel to his painting for the good reason that he partially transposed it on various volumes: vases, jars, dishes , without the technique used for them. ceramics did not interfere with his painted work. (...) It is perhaps not useless to recall that what struck Bernard Alligand above all on his arrival in Morocco, in addition to the arabesques decorating the houses, the fabrics, the carpets, the crockery, was the profusion of vases and flasks which show all the refinement of this civilization . This is precisely what this Revealed Nature painting wanted to take into account from the outset, by spontaneously establishing a link between silhouettes of feminine appearance in the process of disappearing in his paintings and objects making their entry into painting here. We can clearly see, looking at this painting, that there is a superposition, a prelude to a complete substitution because these bottles are animated . They have a human posture . This proves that the process of solidification which would give them their final status as objects has nevertheless not yet been completed. These bottles, still personified, already suggest, however, all the sensuality of their future shapes. By replacing the silhouettes by the linearity and by the volume of the bottles, there is nothing surprising about this. Simple passing of the baton. We vary the theme by changing the lexicon, but we always stay in the same pictorial discourse: an abstract construction, punctuated by lines, punctuated by color and animated by flights of materials, with, from time to time, here or there, a work of Dreaming Sources bringing together a female silhouette and a vase, as if, for Bernard Alligand, it was necessary to recall, in case we have forgotten, the analogy between these two forms, now also voluptuous! 'one than the other. Forms through which Bernard Alligand seems to have rediscovered the physical pleasure he had experienced in kneading clay when he followed modeling lessons, in 1981-1982, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Angers. (...)

Bernard Alligand will largely develop this theme of vases and flasks where the space surrounding these objects suddenly seems in the grip of a cosmic vertigo .

Extract from the Retrospective catalog 2012. Text by Jean-Pierre Geay.