Roger Bissière

Painting, if we truly wish to contemplate its essence, is a living geometry of forms and colors, a sort of new and more complex geometry in which colors and shapes would be inseparable and would react each upon the other, according to laws in which the elements of shape and of color would form one continuous whole.

In art, mathematics must be subordinate to phantoms. The good painter is the painter who buries a color every day.

The hand must venture into the unknown, it must remain alive to the danger it is courting, it must sense the brink.

A painting is the image of someone, a projection of the person in his entirety, devoid of lies or hesitation, with his flaws and his assets alike. Painting can brook no lies.

I do not go into a museum or to an exhibit to see paintings, but to meet people.

As we make one discovery, we already sense that we are about to make another, and hence the idea is ever ahead of achievement. Whence your torment, my torment, and the torment of all those who still struggle all their lives with the certainty of defeat.

The views we hold are of little importance. They are, moreover, limited. However incisive they may be, they have long been commonplace. The only way to awaken them is to find another angle from which to look. That rejuvenates them and makes them original, a result of being distorted in some unexpected manner through the prism of certain human minds.

I think that in order to attain self-fulfillment one must be brave enough to hover at the brink and to fall at times. It is by paying this price, and through dangerous undertakings that one emerges sufficiently original to be able to see the way clearly and stick to it without faltering.

I do not like masterpieces. There is something terribly boring about masterpieces. The painters who evoke response in me have never been the creators of masterpieces. They have not exactly made pictures; but rather they have made mirrors in which their own image was reflected with an unsettling candor.

Cows in Paris--that does not mean much. For me, it is different. I do not disdain their company, and I have never become bored around them. They have large bright eyes: they are silent, gentle and pensive. They are simple and elementary like the Earth on which they stand and the grass on which they tread.