Outsider Environments Europe: Philippe Burnel, Jardin avec sculptures / Sculpture garden

this image and the next eight from Burnel's Facebook account

The image above shows a creation that is part of an art environment that has developed over the past few years. The site is located in the small village of Jouy-en-Argonne with about 50 inhabitants, 13 km west of the town of Verdun in the north-west of France,

Life and works

This art environment, which currently is still in development, actually was started as a creative project in July 2021 by Philippe Burnel, born in 1966. The photo below shows the very first cement-formed creation added to the site,

the first sculpture in the garden, July 2021

Burnel, who lives in Verdun, where he has a job in the archives of the post office, was active as a sportsman in his younger years. However, he was increasingly drawn to making works of art. Following this vocation, he started working as a self-taught artist around the year 2000, when he was in his early thirties.

Initially, as an admirer of Salvador Dali, Burnel made surrealist paintings, but after meeting the Verdun painter Serge Pighi (1941-2018), he found his own style, characterized by a lively, colorful palette and a critical, sometimes rather sharp view of what happens in everyday life.

The persons and other items featured in his work are often depicted in relief, what he achieves by adding paper-mache to the canvas or panel used for the creation and transforming this layer in such a way that the intended image appears and can be painted after the drying of the paper mache.

Numerous works by Burnel can be seen in the videos in the documentation below.

In 2010, Brunel bought an old barn in Jouy-en-Argonne, in which he set up a studio. As shown in the very first image there is a large, elongated piece of hilly grassland behind this barn.

Apart from some decorated wooden totems, placed by Burnel on this area, it remained untouched for over a decade. However in July 2021 Burnel began developing an art environment on this area by adding a variety of sculptures made from cement.

Just as Burnel uses a fixed technique for his paintings to achieve dimensionality, he has a specific method for making these sculptures. An infrastructure of iron mesh, broadly in the shape of the desired image, is covered with cement, after which the resulting structure is transformed into the intended design of the sculpture by means of mortar.

Over the past two years, Burnel has already produced an ensemble of sculptures in a style on parts similar to that of his paintings. This, however, with one major exception: Brunel has chosen not to color the finished creations, but to set them up unprocessed in the gray tint the mortar has.

This might be significant.

In Burnel's paintings the color scheme underlines the character of the person depicted, in the art environment the ubiquitous color gray has a connecting effect. The ensemble as such is paramount and the parts each contribute to the impression that the whole evokes.

The interrelation within the ensemble is expressed in many parts of this art environment, for example characters that are connected to each other by an actual embrace or by a long winding sculpted tube.

So far the regional press has not given any publicity to Burnel's growing art environment, nor has it been reported in publications in the French field of art environments. Burnel's Facebook page is the only place so far where photos have appeared and (much positive) comments have been made.

One of those comments suggests that Burnel could open the site to visitors once he retires, which Burnel, who is in his late 50s, thought was a nice idea.

However, at the moment there is no visitor regulation yet, so this article does not mention the address of Philippe Burnel's sculpture garden.

New additions

After this post was published in July 2023, Burnel published photos of new additions to his art environment:

addition published August 2023

addition published April 2024

Documentation

* Burnell's weblog

* Burnell on Facebook

* Entries about Burnell's paintings on website Passions-art, with a video and on website Artpulsion

* Article in regional newspaper l'Est Républicain about an exposition (April 2022) of Burnell's paintings, with a short referral to the decorated garden

* Article in the same journal about an exposition in 2016

Videos

*Video (123.47) May 2016, YouTube, with Burnel being interviewed in a radio-show