Le bateau 

Curator: Ah, yes, this piece by Bernard Reder— "Le bateau," an engraving, shimmering with dream logic. What impressions arise for you at first glance? Editor: Bleak grandeur. It’s intensely graphic, like an etching ripped from a particularly vivid nightmare. The heavy blacks swallow everything but the suggestion of a distant horizon and this very ominous vessel. Curator: Nightmarish, perhaps, though I see a powerful expression of our relationship with the unknown. Bernard Reder conjures landscapes and beings that teeter between mythology and pure fantasy. Editor: Indeed! Observe how Reder crafts this pictorial space; he inverts traditional figure-ground relationships. See how he disrupts the natural order through exaggerated chiaroscuro, distorting forms, and strategically obscuring details. He's almost working against legibility. Curator: It feels like Reder’s wrestling with something profoundly personal through universal symbols. What kind of voyage are these figures embarking upon? Is that ship real, or a specter rising from their collective unconscious? And who, or what, are these hybrid beings accompanying this leviathan? The central figure appears as a chimera of women, bird and mythical creature… what significance do you think Reder assigns to its juxtaposition in this almost ritualistic display of humanity’s primordial origins and ultimate destiny? Editor: One cannot ignore Reder’s employment of symbolism to elicit these allegorical overtones—those monstrous silhouettes might evoke both wonder and unease, but the underlying thread here is a preoccupation with a semiotic crisis! Reder deliberately destabilizes and questions the traditional representational mode! It has an intense gravity to it. Curator: Maybe it's not a crisis, but rather a deep well of imagination where the self dissolves into myth. Where the known world bows to a richer, truer, subjective reality, like an ancient echo calling out to the modern soul. Editor: Perhaps. Reder leaves the doors to interpretation wide open—as art, arguably, should. Curator: Absolutely. What a wild voyage indeed, across canvas, time and mind.