Janos Ber's Retrospective at Hôtel des Arts, Toulon

The Hôtel des Arts in Toulon, France, presented a retrospective of Janos Ber from March 16 to April 28, 2002, featuring around fifty paintings spanning the last two decades, with emphasis on works from 1990 onward and recent pieces. Ber, born in Budapest in 1937, has lived in France since 1957. His painting is modernist in essence, where expression arises through the process of painting itself, not from preconceived ideas. His method involves painting with liquid acrylic on paper, then cutting the sheets—historically into shapes, now focusing on the act of cutting in vertical, diagonal, or horizontal lines. The resulting surfaces are rearranged and marouflaged onto canvas. Earlier works exhibited dynamic movement, while recent paintings organize around a central false symmetry. Color has shifted from large quasi-monochrome areas to simple, vibrant brushstrokes, with the overall composition converging toward the center without exact coincidence, preserving a sense of gap or escape. The background may be colored or white, and the strokes range from red, yellow, blue, green to black. This reduction in means yields both immediate readability and a subtle complexity that maintains the joy of looking.