Bernard John Bailly
Born in 1949.
Bernard John Bailly presents himself as a painter committed to the “rehabilitation of landscape painting” and describes himself as a “resister against the art that some call contemporary”, a claim that informs a practice devoted to figuration and large-scale formats.
His formal credo is expressed as follows: “see big, think big, make big”, and he works primarily in very extensive formats, on the order of 1.5 to 3 square metres.
Alongside his painting practice, he worked as a teacher of visual arts: at the CO de Budé and the Ecole de culture générale (ECG) in Geneva from 1972 to 1980, then at the CO du Belluard from 1981 to 2014 and at the Collège Saint‑Michel from 1983 to 2014, amounting to more than thirty years of teaching at secondary level.
In his methods, he uses charcoal pencils to render contours—a formal resource that the documentation explicitly relates to historical analogies—and thus renews the line in his landscapes.
Two motifs recur regularly in his work: mountains and twisted or broken trees, recurrent elements of his visual vocabulary.
The subjects he chooses are rooted in the local landscape—“des sujets d’ici pour un public d’ici”—including Les Gastlosen, the Fribourg Pre-Alps, the Sanetsch, the Château‑d'Oex region, the Moléson and the Lac de la Gruyère, all treated in the large formats that characterise his practice.
His work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Musée de Charmey, notably “La Jogne en grand format” (2014) and “Monuments de pierre – Janet et Bernard Bailly” (2024), and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Fribourg acquired paintings by the artist in 2020.
He also published Table des Matières (Éditions Belzedicts, 1996) and, together with Carol Bailly, produced the illustrations for Face by Georges Savoy (Éditions Belpresse, 2001).