Carmen, the opera by Georges Bizet premiered in 1875, unfolds the tragic destiny of a defiant woman in a dreamlike Spain, where freedom clashes with possessiveness, and desire with violence. Carmen, the fierce gypsy, embodies the power of instinct and the refusal of all constraint: she loves freely, lives intensely, and pays with her life for her rejection of the established order. Around her, Don José — a soldier consumed by passion — descends into jealousy and murder. Against a backdrop of Andalusian songs, dances, and bullfights, Bizet composes a score of rare tension, blending popular lyricism with tragic architecture. Each aria becomes a cry, a seduction, a struggle: it is festivity before catastrophe, music dancing on the edge of the abyss.
In his Carmen lithograph series from 1981, Bernard Buffet translates this lyrical myth into a sharp, taut, almost ascetic visual language. His figures are outlined in black, their bodies rigid, their eyes fixed, their faces carved in shadow. The Spanish mantillas, the arenas, the bullfighters, the choruses are all present—yet stripped of anecdote. It is no longer a story but a fate. Buffet does not paint Carmen; he engraves her destiny. The violence of his line becomes the metaphor of inexorable doom. Red is no longer merely the color of love or blood—it becomes an incandescent substance, the very essence of passion and death. By superimposing symbols—the arena, the fans, the unyielding gazes—Buffet gives form to a theater where humanity has lost control, where figures turn into archetypes. Thus, Carmen in Buffet’s work is not the illustration of an opera but the pictorial transposition of a burning myth, suspended between restrained eroticism, tragic tension, and symbolic austerity.
