Contemporary French Art: 2 (Faux Titre)

Contemporary French Art 2 Gérard Garouste Colette Deblé Georges Rousse Geneviève Asse Martial Raysse Christian Jaccard ...

Author: Michael Bishop

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Contemporary French Art 2 Gérard Garouste Colette Deblé Georges Rousse Geneviève Asse Martial Raysse Christian Jaccard Joël Kermarrec Danièle Perronne Daniel Dezeuze Philippe Favier Daniel Nadaud

FAUX TITRE 362 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Contemporary French Art 2 Gérard Garouste Colette Deblé Georges Rousse Geneviève Asse Martial Raysse Christian Jaccard Joël Kermarrec Danièle Perronne Daniel Dezeuze Philippe Favier Daniel Nadaud

Michael Bishop

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2011

Cover illustration: Philippe Favier, from the Antiphonium series. Courtesy of the artist. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3346-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0045-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ......................................................................................... 7 Unrepresenting Meaning: Gérard Garouste ................................. 9 Windows Upon the Unseen: Colette Deblé ............................... 29 The Light of Death, a Sacredness of Doing: Georges Rousse ... 47 The Intimacy of Silence: Geneviève Asse ................................. 69 Hygiene, Thought, Quest, Consent: Martial Raysse .................. 87 The Endless Imprinting of Being: Christian Jaccard ............... 111 Desire and Deception, the Metonymies of Artifice: Joël Kermarrec ......................................................................... 129 The Plastic Life of the Psyche: Danièle Perronne ................... 147 Structure and Aeration, Freedom and the Unnameable: Daniel Dezeuze ........................................................................ 165 Proliferation, Mutation, Phantasm, the Ceremony of the Real: Philippe Favier ......................................................................... 183 The Art of War and Peace: Daniel Nadaud ............................. 203 Conclusion ............................................................................... 221 Selected Bibliography.............................................................. 225

PREFACE The words I offer here will be extremely brief: the entirety of Contemporary French Art 1, appearing some two and a half years ago, I deem to constitute the best introduction I could possibly make to the second volume which now has reached its completion with some further eleven studies of major artists whose work is of equal urgency, depth and pertinence. My purpose here is thus principally to thank all of the artists whose work I examine here and who, along with the many galleries and museums with whom they have collaborated in bringing us their plastic, but, too, profoundly existentially significant testimony, have shown great generosity in providing me with materials, answering certain of my queries and often allowing for exchanges that have been of great assistance in furthering my appreciation of the tireless activity involved in the generation of oeuvres of considerable proportions. The studies that follow, as with those of the earlier volume, are predicated on the need I feel to privilege close ‘reading’ of their plastic gestures. Whilst I may draw occasional comparisons and establish certain contrasts, it has not been my intention to overly theorise or historicise in terms too abstracted, too notionally and, indeed, analytically distanced, from oeuvres which demand a true concentration rather upon their endless specificities, those characteristics that distinguish them both modally and, if I may put things that way, ontologically – in regard, that is, to the relation ever developing between their doing, the poiein that drives them forward, and that sense of some vital ‘presence to the world’, no matter how tensely articulated such a presence may be lived. The chapters that follow will in consequence seek to dig insistently into the what, the how and the why of individual oeuvres, without feeling obliged to dwell upon overlappings and interpertinencies. The Conclusion that will be finally offered at the close of these eleven chapters will not, either, endeavour to put the same hat on eleven people who do not share the same residence or hat size. Indeed may own and wear no hat at all. Let me add one further note before allowing the book to plunge headlong into the teeming fascinations, beauties, conceptions and sensings that have engaged me over the last two years or so: there are, of course, artists I

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Contemporary French Art 2

cannot embrace in either of the two volumes of Contemporary French Art, artists I admire and who, just conceivably, I may have the opportunity to speak of elsewhere. Their omission here is a matter of time and space. As with the work of all of the twenty-two artists the two volumes tussle with, their work too will beam forth, and must always be understood to beam forth, from that gesture, that gaze, of appreciation that is yours, mine, any viewer’s. The words that follow I give as words of gratitude. The gaze is what ever will matter.

Michael Bishop Halifax and Wolfville, Nova Scotia December, 2010

UNREPRESENTING MEANING: GÉRARD GAROUSTE To gaze upon works such as La Chambre rouge (1982) or Sainte Thérèse d’Avila (1983), La Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon rouge (1984), or, yet again, any of the 1988 Indiennes, the 2003 Saintes Ellipses or the various paintings of the 2006 suite, L’Ânesse et la figue, is to enter a figural universe of the strangely, hauntingly familiar, an at times troubling phantasmagoricalness yet anchored in both celebration and an ironic postmodernism ever searching for, and dreaming, value, meaning beyond sayableness.1 La Chambre rouge, a large 295 x 250 cm chromatically striking oil on canvas, for example, inverts traditional modes of male-female nudity, dressing woman, baring male anatomy, doing so moreover whilst offering an ambiguous drama of sleep, possible intoxication, even death, this in a context of pure, swirling, undefined and aperspectival theatricality of human being and doing, an atmosphere of lyrical intensity beyond sentimentality and narrative fixity. The various Indienne oils of 1988, even larger (210 x 85 cm or 210 x 690 cm), constitute tapestry-like creations that, whilst, like La Chambre rouge or La Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon rouge, seeming to obey a representational model, yet defy description with their bizarrely unified yet amorphous, fluid forms, their floating figures, fish-like, yet bird-like too, and oneirically human, all harmonised in a swimming theatre of yellows, greens and black upon lit purples. The huge, exquisitely elegant acrylic and wrought iron installation Les Saintes Ellipses, first exhibited at the Chapelle Saint Louis de la Salpêtrière and recently in the Panthéon (2006), soars over 12 metres from its small mirror base to unfold the eight boldly and exultantly flared wings of its octagonal painted trumpet revealing the elliptically proffered significance of the forms and phenomena of emergent, ever surging createdness, as well as the texts inscribed on the inner surfaces of the vast painted ‘cornet’, visible and meditatable via their mirrored images.

1

See Selected Bibliography. Many online resources are available, but there is no personal website.

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Critics from Philippe Dagen and Pierre Cabanne to Marc Augé and François Rachline have lavished high praise on an oeuvre that Catherine Strasser has argued embodies l’inqualifiable, factors at once beyond neat classification and exuding ineffableness. Louis and Maurice Ladey have spoken of a ‘rewriting of the history of art that is [Garouste’s] alone’; Marc Le Bot has seen in the great sweep of a work beginning with the 1969 Dessins monumentaux, through the ever evolving figures of ‘indianness’ and ‘classicalness’, down to more recent work stemming from Garouste’s readings of Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes and other texts, the teeming traces of ‘human destiny dramatised’; Anne Dagbert, thinking of the 1973 Comédie policière but implicitly of much else, has written of an ‘insolent and caustic vis-ion of art’ that is constantly, if most subtly, ever at play – a vision buoyed by the paradox of Garouste’s avowal of a ‘need for rules, sac-redness, taboos, myths’ and yet his equally confessed consciousness that he can only generate a pretence of belief in them.2 Garouste’s global gesture, of course, may be said to be shrouded in the shimmer of the make-believe, an atmosphere where l’être and le paraître act out their impossible resolution – indeed, one is ever tempted to speak of their inseparableness, just as one might deem indivisible, subtly melded in indefinable ways, the real and the imaginative, matter and mind, or Garouste’s ‘representation’ of Le Classique et l’Indien, whether in his early oil on paper (1972), his 1977 play of that name (which is, in 2008, being once again staged in Paris), or comparative-contrastive analyses we might endeavour to make with respect to not only works such as the 1971 Le Classique and the 1988 Indienne ser-ies, but also many other oils and gouaches, labelled Sans titre, given to us in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The quirkiness of much of Garouste’s oeuvre is not at all that of a Ben Vautier, provocative, funky, tongue-in-cheek, nor that of a François Morellet, formally clever, though baroquely, capriciously minimalist. Garouste’s idiosyncraticalness reveals a personal plunge into the phantasmatic, a surreal strangeness evident in multiple forms: the 1970 L’Homme-papillon or Le miroir, le pendu et le vase bleu (1985) or, again, the numerous oils, etchings, gouaches and sculptures of, for example, the 1987-91 period, beautifully reproduced in the Kunstverein Hannover`s 1992 Gérard Garouste. This is 2

All translations are my own throughout this book.

Unrepresenting Meaning: Gérard Garouste

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an art where the seemingly angelic and the perhaps demonic, the sacred and the profane, readily fuse their energies, engage and mingle their mysteries. It is, moreover, not a matter, simply, of freely and openly meditating such energies via pseudo-transcriptions of ancient Hebraic and other texts, as in paintings such as Les Anges déchus or Enoch et l’ange, for the kind of pure allusiveness such works convey via their play of light and dark and their staging of formless presences is mirrored in many other works such as the 1988 Indienne pieces or the etchings just mentioned, where grace and menace, delicacy and seeming aggression, wingedness and sacrifice appear to be knotted together in dreamscapes ever on the brink of nightmarish phantasmagoria. Lest one might thus imagine an oeuvre in full psychic dérive, the mind and the imagination projecting the pure theatre of its utterly unconstrained contents, I would emphasise immediately two factors. Firstly, that the work of Garouste, though skirting about certain forms, experiences even, of what he himself has called madness, yet remains an oeuvre, a series of works and a vast, ongoing deeply personal and lived démarche, that ever concerns itself with its own ethics, with the swirling meaning of its engagement with self and world. I shall return with some intensity to this finely balanced equation, but suffice it to say in this initial foray into Garouste’s plastic universe that an oil such as the 1978 Bouchon de champagne – with its startling orange-red staging of two women, a man turned towards them, a baby, a large dog, this interior domestic scene set in turn against an equally dramatic backcloth of crashing waves, wild sky and landscape, the cork sitting in the silent pool of its pure, unstabilisable implicitness – such a painting, like so many to come, whether offering the full-bodiedness of Colomba (1982), the oneiricism shrouding the stick figures of Paysage indien, or the dis- and re-membered humanity of recent series such as Portraits (2004) or L’Ânesse et la figue (2006), such a painting, whilst rife with the early modes of a strangeness, a tension, an exile-within-the-familiar that many later works will push to the extremes of unsettledness, eccentricity and quasi-delirium, yet reveals that powerful engagedness that is ever Garouste’s with the drama of human life, its charm and its rawness, its fragility in the midst not only of the external stage – the earth, the cosmos – on which it plays itself out, but, too, the inner, psychic, emotional stage of incarnation. Here,

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then, is an art that depicts wildness and contingency, whilst simultaneously struggling, choosing to struggle, with a deeper content of its signifiers, meditating the very ethos of its own bizarre, unfathomable yet evokable urgency. The second factor I would wish to bring to the fore is the tensionality at work in Garouste’s oeuvre, a tensionality now evident in moving from one work to another, now within a single painting or other creation, and which both opposes and joins, on the one hand, the disturbing, the physically and psychologically challenging in a context of unknowing, uncertainty, even disabusedness, and, on the other hand, the playful, the ironic, even what we may take as a certain jubilancy. The large oil on canvas (250 x 310 cm) La Constellation du chien (1982), for example, gives us – and, if I stress here the role of the viewer-receiver, it is in perfect coincidence with Garouste’s own relinquishment of interpretive power – the same dark, swirling chromatics as Colomba, plunges us into the extraordinary, unheimlich yet inalienably familiar human doing glimpsed in its unsituatable, at once symbolic and visceral, dramaticalness, a world of vast, cosmic energies, now awing, now truly frightening, ever relativising our doing, and perhaps our very being. La Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon rouge, not dissimilarly, may disturb as we sense what we may feel to be the root nature of the human condition, the shadow of death (and thus the enigma of our very being) cast over human action, its indec-ipherable pertinence, the strange arbitrariness of its accoutrements (: red pants) – all of this yet perhaps, and incomprehensibly, somehow offset by that same strange doing, that faire, that barely accountable, outlandish poiein,3 to which the artist equally gives himself in a tense gesture of playing with its fantastic feasibilities. And Orion, le classique, of the same period (1991-92), offers a memorable scene of some primordial ‘golden age’, a tumultuous dangerous time-place of survival or succumbing with its dark and gleaming muscular dance of body and instinctual thought: any ‘play’ here is that of the raw theatre of being-in-the-world, the wild exuberance of perhaps brief incar-

3

I use throughout the notion of poiein and poietic in order to emphasise the distinction that can be made between a generic, formal thinking of the poetic and one that has in mind that raw etymological sense of ‘doing’, ‘making’, beyond aesthetic considerations, a ‘creating’ simultaneously visceral, gestural and blindingly, instinctively psychical, mental in the most fundamental of mentation’s modes.


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nation, signifying ... the pure intensity of itself? Other work, however, reveals what may be taken as a greater level of ease, even ludicity, ironicalness and even humour. The 1982 Déjeuner sur l’herbe pastiches and transforms, picking up on Manet’s own subversions, honouring them, feeling them out further. The 1999 Désir, a smaller oil (73 x 60 cm), manifests a significant change in manner if we compare it, say, to any Indienne or the 1989 La Conversation. The dog-horse it features is in marked interplay with the dog that can so often accompany le Classique, with or without l’Indien (cf. the 1982 Le Classique, le miroir et le chien); sexual arousal, its intensity but no doubt also its bizarre, slightly ludicrous improbability, takes thematic centre stage; the human figure is shown, beyond gratuitous disfiguration, as an emblem of the self’s pure and complex ‘circularity’: the forms, heightened by the forceful chromatics, are stark yet bold, even humorous. The 2007 Logique, part of the delightfully and liberatingly titled 2009 exhibition La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède, goes yet much further towards easefulness and jubilancy in setting before us the four grinning faces of its triptych, the twisting puzzle of their bodies, the coy gazes which engage, entice and smilingly challenge the viewer, the white and black disk-mirrors hinting perhaps at the temptation and futility of narcissism. The ‘logic’ of Logique?: a juggling and playing with self’s being, art as a pure ludic, though meditated, never gratuitous poiein (: doing, making, creating) of being’s pure plasticity. I should like now to examine more pointedly the shifting modes of Gérard Garouste’s art, firstly the material means to which it has recourse, and, secondly, the manners and styles it chooses to deploy in attaining to a fulfilment of those driving if elusive purposes that propel it and to which, prior to any concluding observations that will emerge, I shall seek to offer particular attention. Critics have often remarked upon the relative influence of past masters upon the work of Garouste, and the correspondingly minimal impact of the activities of his contemporaries upon his démarche. If, yet, Garouste remains most conscious of the work of, say, Beuys, Twombly, Baselitz, Warhol – with whom he has exhibited –, or else, nearer to home, Buren, Toroni or Parmentier, and if he recognizes the great import of Duchamp in bringing to a close art’s representational period, his decision principally to paint and his view of the non-modernity of painting as relieving him of any need to seek novelty thus take his gesture and his oeuvre

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out of any strictly chronological necessities of means and manners. François Rachline argues that ‘therein lies [Garouste’s] genius’ – in a freedom that may dip unconstrainedly into the ‘memory’ of art, simultaneously appropriate (Tintoretto, Rubens, Titian, etc., it may be argued for some of Garouste’s work, and Chardin, too, and Chirico and Goya) and ‘deny’, transmute, project into the past’s infinite futures, just as the produced present plasticity may retroject us back out of the fixity of the present – as with, Garouste writes, the application of the Hebrew prefix vav. Thus, nothing in the past can be said to determine present action, whilst at the same time past art and text may become a ‘reservoir of unexplored possibleness’, as Rachline rightly argues. The material means exploited by the art of Gérard Garouste are, however, far more extensive than painting’s oils on canvas, which, yet, remain a dominant feature whilst ringing the changes of manner and technique with regard to the application of the traditional tools of painting. Le Classique et l’Indien of 1977, whilst embedded in his early paintings of 1971-72 and greatly dependent upon the decors he paints in 1977, yet opts for a projection of such plasticity onto the stage where Garouste’s strange play, ‘nearer to performance or a happening than traditional theatre’ Pierre Cabanne suggests, actionless, fusing initially spectatorship and spectacle, offers an ‘argument’ one might think critical to all of the artist’s subsequently developed oeuvre: ‘someone normal tells the story of someone else’ – here, the ‘classic’, supposedly rational, coherent, articulating the beingness of the ‘indian’, his alter ego, for normality is only the secret and utterly relative face of the ‘madness’ he thus relates. That such extreme hybridisation and radical displacement of artistic means continues to attract Garouste will soon become apparent with the creation of the 1979 Comédie policière and La Règle du jeu of same year, but it is also worth noting, somewhat parenthetically, that Le Classique et l’Indien has just re-emerged in 2008, at the time of this writing, with, once again, Garouste in an acting role, the play, ‘spectacle drolatique’ as it is billed, yet transformed in multiple ways – an ever changing spectacle-performance-theatre, a conscious con-fusion of identities, a constant interplay and meditation of painting, texts of various provenance (Rabelais, Bible, Kabbalah), and so on –, and, at least in part, seeking to convey both the idea that, as Garouste puts it, ‘painting is not an end in itself, but a means’, and the parallel notion that ‘all is


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linked’ beyond the appearance of being’s/art’s fragmentedness. Comédie policière, using the classical elements of painting, oil on canvas, sets before us a non-linear, only loosely logically gathered series of eleven paintings staging the unsolvable puzzle of a story involving the same man, the same two women, child and dog we have seen in Bouchon de champagne. Other artists such as Louise Bourgeois or Annette Messager, Sophie Calle or Ben, can bypass painting to create a theatre that envelops and teases the mind and the senses. It is most unusual, as here with Garouste, to give over painterly means to, on the one hand, paint’s capacity to produce rich, quasi-mimetic sensuality, on the other, to an illusionist absence of discourse that only confirms painting’s pure posturing as something other than itself: in this way painting is shown to be able to produce the same masking, dancing, gesturing, the same expectancy and anxiety that these eleven canvases portray, and, at the same time, reveal the pure fancifulness of such a production, its enchanting, captivating emptiness, if you like. La Règle du jeu goes, materially, procedurally, much further: it too, involves a staging of arch, audacious, pure implicitness, that of art, its process and its product, but its means transmute significantly: a small earthenware base (33 x 26 x 27cm), four bronze ‘needles’ thrust into it, various moulded pieces, the whole marking out a labyrinth of potential interconnectedness and accompanied both by a series of sixteen photographs and references to mythological figures, some of which are explored too in paintings ‘outside’ the theatre of La Règle du jeu – in Cerbère et le masque (1980), for example. If there are rules to the mental play with/of art’s material means, they clearly are the self’s, Garouste’s, though they are equally proffered to be reworked in what Francis Ponge would term the fabrique4 – but of the other, you, me, in the mental, interpretive manufacturing of an indeterminacy that is yet witting, conscious of its play.

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Whilst it is true that for Ponge, this place of ‘manufacture’ is one allowing, essentially, for the deploying of intellection in the form of linguistic analogy and ‘differentiality’, a place wherein object becomes ‘obplay’ and ‘objoy’, reality slipping into its purely and ‘thickly’ semantic clothing, yet it remains that the production of obplay and objoy is ever also the task of the reader/observer/thinker Ponge is not, an other charged with the building of one of many other fabriques, which are, equally, manufacturing devices: the body and all that pertains to its impact on mind has its role. To convince oneself of the pertinence of this latter point for Garouste, one need only read his recent autobiography, L’Intranquille.

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Sculpture of various modes is by no means a rare creative stratagem in the work of an artist who yet is known principally for his painting. Take, for example, the twelve pieces exhibited in Hannover in 1992, largely crafted in wrought iron and terra cotta, but also in bronze. They can now bring that aerial but supple stick-like minimality to the surprisingly graceful presence they impose via their size (410 x 340 x 32 cm, for example), now a more compacted, denser form (54 x 20 x 33 cm, for example) to their untitled strangeness, now a combination of the chunky and the wiry, the latter requiring elasticity and elongation to set off its dynamics. The use of metal, usually wrought iron, is central to various other major works by Garouste such as La Dive Bacbuc of 1998 with its painted canvases all hung about a circular metal frame, or Les Saintes Ellipses whose eight painted panels soar high upon the sturdiness of their towering flared iron supports, or again, the 1995 painting and wrought iron creation for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, titled La Rosée. Hommage à Cervantès. Ceramic work can equally constitute an important creative means for Garouste, witness the work done in 1994 for the Palais de Justice in Lyon, also involving sculptural pieces. Notwithstanding the mastery of a variety of techniques, materials and procedural visions such works deploy, it remains that painting does not cease to be Gérard Garouste’s primary means of conveying the energies, the meditations and explorations at the heart of his creative gesture, though, once again, our conception of the act and place of painting must stay fluid. We have already seen this with, say, La Dive Bacbuc where the canvases, painted on both sides, form a kind of decorated roofless tent. Then there are the ceilings and friezes, done in 1992, for example, for the ‘First Lady’s Chamber’ at the Elysée, or, in 2000, for the Salle des mariages de l’Hôtel de Ville in Mons. Just as the 1977 staging of Le Classique et l’Indien involved the painting of the play’s sets, and the 1979 Comédie policière depended entirely on an implicit ‘staging’ of its eleven component canvases, so do we find Garouste’s acceptance of the commission to paint a huge new stage curtain for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris to be in perfect accord not only with his love for the theatre but, too, his free and easy contextualisation of the gesture and the product of painting: no museal compulsion, no sense of some austere sacrosanctness attaching to its exhibition, rather a reinsertion thereof in a working environment that yet emphasises its own intrinsic combination of the illusory and the magically cathartic. ‘Painting’,


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however, for Garouste, as for many artists, can assume numerous material modes: the oils may give way to acrylics, as with the various Indiennes or Les Saintes Ellipses; paint proper can yield to aquatint, encre de Chine, pencil, charcoal, sanguine, pastel; the whole of such an arsenal can be ditched for lithographs and etchings. Garouste’s great artisanal alertness can lead to the preparation of his own substances, moreover, and is reflected in the great chromatic sensitivity and range his works manifest. And, finally, in this most brief assessment of the material means Garouste deploys, I would emphasis the significance and the relative originality of, firstly, the seeming off-handedness implied by the incorporation into art of its ‘errors’, erasures, its marginal microstudies of detail, even personal notes that one might have thought likely to be relegated to documents external to the artwork; secondly, the role of language, reproduced textual fragments once again within the framework of the painting itself and, commonly enough, in addition to observations written outside of the plastic arena. Beyond, yet entirely via, such material means of creation there lie, of course, the modes and manners of figural process and conceptualisation. For Garouste this involves a number of tensely developed and paradoxically interlocking elements which I shall seek to examine in telescoped form: 1: Garouste’s art is elaborated in various serial manners. There is the strict seriality that groups paintings using an identical title: the Sans titre of certain periods in particular (198687, 1990-92), but there is no period when such designation falls utterly from favour; the paintings that have centred upon, for example, now Dante, now Cervantes, now Villon, dipping into often extensive textual material to create a freely ensuing ensemble of plastic meditation and accompaniment; or there is the looser serialness that combines and interlaces, for example, the Indiennes with the plays of 1977 and 2008 (Le Classique et l’Indien) and yet other works such as Orion, le classique. Essentially, all such serial manners betray both spontaneous obsessiveness and the desire to come to terms, ethical, spiritual, psychological terms, with particular thematics, myths, intellectualised structures that have caught the imagination and tested the rational capacity of many.

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2: to accomplish such exploration Garouste tends himself to resort to an apparently narrative manner, though he deems narrativity to constitute, for the artist-thinker he has become, a ‘trap’. To gaze upon the 1978 pastel and pencil Le Classique et l’Indien or the oil on paper work of 1972 is to be cast into recognisable yet very differingly fabled settings, but in both cases, as with many works to come, and no matter the level of oneiricism or idiosyncrasy, we understand that we are plunged into the very deep strangeness of human doing and being, its fabulous drama beyond the limits of definitive, definable anecdote. 3: in consequence, the ‘story’ of the human condition reveals what Garouste himself has called its ‘secrecy’, the ‘enchantment’, too, of its, despite all, unspokenness, its flagrant observableness clad yet in an obscurity that only the presumptuous would convert into neat rational equations. It is via such manners of the unsayable yet seen in contexts we recognise as mythically pertinent that Garouste’s art elaborates itself. The wonderful 1984 La Danse et la lutte, with its mingling of darkness and goldenness, its flashes of pure white and celestial blue, is a perfect illustration of that Rimbaldian rhythmic dance of human doing that yet is simultaneous with its, as Victor Hugo would deem it, heroic struggle – yet, as with works such as Adhara (1981) or the recent Ellipse (2001), the ‘narrative’ is so vast, so universal, so stripped of any anecdotally contextualisable specifics that, in a sense, once more, we feel we are immersed in the wild, primordial ‘indianness’ indistinguishable from the only seemingly illusorily steadying epistemological impulse of ‘classicalness’. 4: the challenge for Gérard Garouste, then, revolves, one might say, about, on the one hand, the desire to ‘say’, to show, to provide a place of figural meditation, and, on the other, the equally felt desire to eschew representation, a desire predicated on the sense of the radical impossibility of any gesture of representation, and this, despite the temptation thereof or the easy slippage into its reductiveness. Works such as that done for the 1997 stained glass windows of Notre Dame de Talant and, to a lesser extent, the earlier large oil on canvas


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(200 x 300 cm) Sainte Therèse d’Avila, put to the test the gesture of non-representative yet referentially loaded art and Garouste has spoken of a dissatisfaction and a discomfort with respect to the former of these two undertakings. The series of paintings grouped under the exhibition title of L’Ânesse et la figue may be said to run a similar gauntlet in the sense that Garouste plunges headlong into the interpretation of significant texts which he is not at all reluctant to quote and which, in principle, run the risk of overdetermining his painting. Garouste’s chosen manner demands, and finds, a great sensitivity to such a challenge and it is unsurprising to discover that his mantra, recently reconfirmed, dwells upon the futile pretentiousness of absolute naming and figuration: ‘The certainty of represent-ation, he maintains, rightly, I should argue, is mere vanity’. The dys-figurations we observe, especially in Garouste’s more recent works where his manner takes to a dismembering and seemingly absurd, ‘mad’ but also humorous re-membering of human anatomy – the canvases of, again, L’Ânesse et la figue or Kezive la ville mensonge or the current La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède amply reveal such a manner –, such dys-figurations, with their bizarrely and wittily sinusoidal distortions, clearly constitute a marked refusal of mimesis whilst allowing, encouraging, broad margins of relating to human drama. And, of course, such a manner has multiplied its options from the very outset of Garouste’s plastic adventure, as we see the mutations take us from, say, the phantasmal, hybrid, amoebic Homme-grenouille of 1968 or, of course, the quirky Le Classique et l’Indien of 1972, through the amorphous creatures of the 1988 Indiennes or the strange theatre of form and unform of Le Qohelet et la comédie (1989), down to the various Portraits of 2004 where we appreciate Garouste`s Giacometti-like sense of some fundamental indeterminacy at the very heart of being and human identity. 5: such manners, I should finally maintain, are not simply, perhaps not at all, caricatural. Irony, fancifulness, mental and emotional (self-)liberation have their significant place, but derision and gratuitous, indifferent mockery do not. The sublime

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always vies with the ludic. There is nothing slight about Garouste`s work, it is urgent, intense, it has depth and a purpose beyond the framework of intellectual and spiritual normality, easy logicalness. If theatricality reigns, it is because the theatre of human doing, poiein, is precisely one where dance and struggle, La Danse et la lutte as the eloquent 1984 oil has it, endlessly pull us to and fro between joy and anxiety, instinctively deployed buoyancy and the great tussle of a combative energy driven by fear and wariness. In a sense, too, Garouste`s plastic theatrical manner stages a dramatic playing with the ‘play’, the loose-fitting, indefinable nature of human being, its swirling mythicalness and an unfinishableness that lies at the centre of its ‘narrative’. Works such as the various Indiennes may, as Pierre Cabanne has justly remarked, constitute a ‘challenge to painting’, but their manner does not so much seek to proceed iconoclastically – Garouste’s art reveals respect for and transmutation of iconographic codes – as it endeavours to find some relative, volatile and elastically pertinent correspondence between itself and the nature of being, its ever fluid, elusive and unstabilisable meaning which human discourse congeals at its spiritual and intellectual peril. It does not come as a surprise that Garouste rejects the neat precision and categoricalness that would resume his ‘style’ as ‘baroque’ or ‘fantastic’ or ‘mannierist’. Manner, deemed to be style, veneer, surface, is not at centre-stage in Garouste’s oeuvre, even though the forms it produces are what initially impact us; as with a poet such as Yves Bonnefoy or a fellow artist such as Gérard Titus-Carmel, form is traversed in order to reach through to domains ultimately ethical and ontological.5 The very face of being is at stake in the oil on canvas Portraits of 2004, just as much as in the 1968 Homme-grenouille with its ink and pencil collaging on paper.

5

We have here the essence of Bonnefoy’s privileging of ‘presence’ over ‘image’, the experience of our beingness beyond concept, gnosis, solidified mental structure. All ‘form’, in this way, becomes a channel, a means, rather than an end in what is unfinishable, fluid, becoming. This does not invalidate the provisional, fatally ephemeral, mortal claims of ‘beauty’, aesthetic emotion, but it does reorient art towards what Titus-Carmel calls one’s ‘presence to the world’.


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For Gérard Garouste, as indeed for many others, Marcel Duchamp signals the close of the long era of representational art and, in consequence, forces upon the artist a self-consciousness that brings him or her face to face with what Garouste terms in the book-cumcatalogue L’Ânesse et la figue ‘the question of the subject’. The latter, he clarifies, is ‘a matter of revealing the power of the image as it has shaped our eye, and of showing its purpose and its ambiguities’. Before, then, dealing more intensely with the purposes of art as Garouste perceives them, it is important to appreciate that his conception of the subject, the subject matter, of his a-figurative démarche, already goes beyond a simple giving of plastic images and form to fuse such a gesture with its question, its ongoing self-interrogation, a giving that constantly takes away from any presumed straightforwardness we may believe implicit in its gift. It is for this reason that the teeming existential traces generated by works such as the 1979 Paysage indien, or the 1985 Terrae motus, or, again, the 1998 Trois frères en chemin perform a shimmering dance of the discourse that they may be said to set before us. Human being-in-the-world, human relationality and a full gamut of human doing, yes, certainly, we appreciate these to be the subject of Garouste’s painting, just as he can tell Catherine Strasser in 1984 that ‘the nude, landscape and still life’ lie in significant relation to this ‘subject’ – but, no flat, static portrayal is involved, all groundedness remains volatile, unlocalisable in time and place, phantasmatic, implicit at best. Representation trembles, blurs, manifests its unmanif-estableness, its extreme mythicality, a heroic human masquerade recognisable only glimmeringly, caught in what Garouste terms in Portraits ‘the indeterminacy of worlds’. The wavering finger of myth as Marc Augé writes in the context of Kezive la ville mensonge ‘sow[s] question marks’. The subject of its plasticised images affirms no fixity beyond themselves; it is a fiction, a story, but with no realist or naturalist pretensions and mirroring, whether à la Stendhal or à la Zola. And yet, if this is tantamount to arguing that the deep subject matter of art is the ‘illusion’ Garouste tells Hortense Lyon his own painting perpetrates, let us not in our eagerness to embrace this seemingly simple equation Art = Art ≠ Reality, overlook his simultaneous assertion reported by Laurent Busine in Quixote apocrifo, that a fundamental element of the subject of his work remains the (infinitely dreamable and meditatable) matter of ‘men amongst men’ – i.e. the fabled, fab-ulous, mad-wise, indian-classical comportments of their

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being-together. Though an ‘alibi’, as Pierre Cabanne writes, art and its ‘subject’ yet may be ‘believed’ in, for, I should argue, they allow for the simultaneous, fused exploration of two seemingly paradoxical things: the ethos, the attributable purposes, meanings and values of our hum-an being and doing, and the utter indefinableness, the only apparent, chimerical firmness of image and discourse applied to such being and doing. As Garouste says in the context of L’Ânesse et la figue, ‘there remains the immaterial[,] there remains the question of the subject’.6 The purposes of this fairly extraordinary art may be manifold and complex, but they remain coherent and most consciously meditated and assumed. Perhaps first and foremost, Garouste’s emphasis veers away from aesthetic ambition; form, its delicacy, its refinement, its technical adroitness, its arguable beauty – none of this does he care to dwell upon. Once again in L’Ânesse et la figue he confirms what surely we have sensed from the outset, with L’Homme papillon (1970) or the 1972 oil on paper Le Classique et l’Indien, namely that ‘art ought to have an ethical function, a social reason to exist beyond aesthetic criteria’. Not that such a self-positioning should be thought to discount the beauty of form and colour: the latter cannot but generate a mode of appeal and satisfaction to which artist and viewer in turn cannot help but remain sensitive. It is just that, as a Denis Roche said of poetic writing, one does not involve oneself in it to produce some joli méli-mélo.7 Not dissimilarly, an Yves Bonnefoy can even desire to destroy the potential beauties of one’s created formal perfections, precisely to remind the self of the larger ethical, spiritual dimensions of its poiein, the vaster ontological project in which it is engaged.8 In this sense, such a purposing, whilst consenting to this project, involves equally a level of resistance, neither to earlier representational manners per se, nor even to those, including Garouste’s own, of the pres-

6

My italics. Roche’s desire that poetry and art reveal their ‘combativity’, rather than settling for some formal nicety, is tantamount to declaring the need for an urgency that can only be described as broadly ontological: spiritual in the most open-ended sense of the term, searching, querying on every level of the human ‘logos’: psychological, political, sociological, ethical. Though beyond flagrant paradigms, clearly. 8 Cf. Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. 7


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ent: resistance ‘aim[s simply] to show how the eye is prepared for submission’, he tells us. Always potentially prepared to yield, that is, to the power of the image, to take it to be a figuration of the real. Linked to this, as all these purposes and orienting values form a tight knot of intention, there is the pleasure of painting, a jouissance not, however, stemming from sheer sensuality, the voluptuousness of shape, texture, chromatics, but rather from what Garouste terms, in commenting on his Quixote apocrifo, a ‘wealth of knowledge [allowing the artist] to play with myths themselves’. The work around Cervantes’ novel or the paintings for Kezive la ville mensonge, based on the biblical story of Juda and Tamar, reveal something of the power of such jouissance, whereas series such as La Comédie po-licière or the Indiennes manifest Garouste’s capacity simultaneously to generate images of a more strictly private mythology and beyond any aesthetics of newness, though leaving ‘the beaten paths of congealed iconography’, to succeed in a magnificent and truly epistemologically voluptuous theatrical juggling with that ‘absence of discourse’ he believes painting achieves. Such a theatre of absence, of course, far from creating a void, provokes and produces, in what Bernard Blistène regards as a conjoined ‘staging of the disorientation of the viewer’, a tumult of imaginable discourse, a bubbling whirlpool of thought and phantasm refusing to settle for the comforts of firm and systematised conceptualisation. The purpose of Garouste’s art, then, we may argue further, is to attain to the knowledge, the ‘truth’, of the unsayable. Art’s selfconscious response to the lived and the observable does not aim for closure, opening rather that dialoguing and accompanying at the visible heart of so much of Garouste’s work. The large oil on canvas of 1989, La Conversation, for example, offers us the most curious of insect-like creatures, conversing, ever seeking meaning, exchanging the relativities of never congealable, ongoing meaning: mean-ing, a flowing errancy, a living unfixedness of the being, the doing and the psychic mouvance of self and other, the ever-otherness of all. Surely the early paintings and the 1977/2008 play(s), all titled Le Classique et l’Indien, stage for us such unresolvable, fundamentally silent parleying, a journeying together of A and B, who are, moreover, dimensions of each other, so that the conversing, whilst dialogic, is equally a complex, a folded-together monologue of only seeming differences.

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Such conversing-without-closure can be seen, too, in almost all of the works of the recent Kezive la ville mensonge series, where, as with Beckett in so many of his plays, but his proses also, Compagnie by way of example, no summum of speakable truth or understanding is achieved, though we may live, observe and meditate the ‘truth’ of meaning’s fluidity, its smiling unsettledness, its ironic, obsessing ineffableness. L’Autre Rive hints at such a ceaseless gazing elsewhere for illusory finality; Le Sceau et la vanité thrusts together ephemeral human gesture, death in the form of a skull, and a seal perhaps – the perhaps is the very purposing of such a painting – of secret, occult or even truly cosmic meaning; L’Échange, a diptych moreover, and hence offering an immediate multiplication and complexification, gives us on the left panel, a shrouded figure with dog at a crossroads, a small figure (an ‘Indian’?) approaching, while the right panel, disturbing and quasi-sublime at once, reveals a male figure, an arm stuffed chokingly into his mouth, three golden angelic hands proffered from on high to the tormented figure below, a crescent moon dispassionately, simply, there in the night sky. ‘Truths’, indeed, of a vast oneiric, even at times nightmarish unsayableness, and art as their chosen vehicle. The fact remains, as Gérard Garouste informs us, that ‘I seek truths far beyond painting’. It is a high, though visceral and obsessive, purpose and one that, whilst partly coinciding with the artist’s socioethical vision, must be seen as not constrained by the latter. Nothing, precisely, in Garouste’s démarche or in his produced plastic oeuvre, smacks of the didactic, for the ‘show[ing] how the eye is prepared for submission’ which we have seen him wish to accomplish, takes place via a process not of orientation but of disorientation, not of banally explicative and explicit art but of an art that opens and provokes, and does not pretend to know anything other than the unspeakable. To look at Garouste’s 1995-96 L’Adam aux nuages is to realize that its purposing ‘exceeds its sign’, to echo Yves Bonnefoy speaking of the relationship of ‘presence’ to its ‘image’: this is not painting content to dwell within its own confines; it seeks the primordial, the cosmic; it is simple yet radiantly contemplative, hinting at some pure energy of original being, offering its image though knowing well, and never too well, the fragileness of image in the face of intuited presence. Paintings as seemingly distinct as Isaïe d’Issenheim or Le Coup de l’étrier,


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both from the 2007 series La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède, equally seek to wrestle with demons and visions far in excess of an act of painting deemed to be focussed upon the niceties of its own prestige. The agenda here is the psychic vitality of the self, its capacity for self-knowledge, for breaking through taboos in order to survive and psychically thrive. If painting remains a vehicle of such exploration, liberation and ‘transcendence’, the vehicle is not, in and of itself, the agenda Garouste sets himself. However, in the midst of such desiderata, there can equally be no doubt that the process and the medium of the art Garouste practices are drawn towards some essential, improbable and ironic divineness felt to reside at the centre of all that is: ‘maintain, he writes, entertain the idea of a fundamental, perhaps mystical absence’ – that ineffableness we have so often seen him argue the artist’s poiein functions to generate in order to ‘un-represent’. When speaking with Hortense Lyon of the figuration of the divine, Garouste is clear that what is required is a saying, a painting – one thinks of Notre Dame de Talant or Les Saintes Ellipses, but these are but the flagrant tips of the iceberg of the sacred for a Garouste – of ‘what God is not’. The disarticulations and re-memberings, the disfigurations and transmutations so powerfully present in Garouste’s work, from La Règle du jeu, the endless Sans titre works, to the precisely ever strange amorphous presences of Le Qohelet et la comédie, are the residue of an instinctively dreamed purposing towards the sublime, an ecstasy at once of tears and laughter, an experience of sublimation whereby the image ‘speaks’ via a non-frontal deflected unsaying, a metamorphosis that veils as it subliminally reveals. Such sublime subliminalness in Garouste is played out via an imagination beyond limits, laws, interdicts, beyond too any illusion in the face of what Gérard Georges Lemaire terms ‘metaphysical collapse’, though – critically – ever engendering what Anne Dagbert subtly argues is ‘an elucidation of an enigma of relationships between the visible and the invisible’. The sublime may thus hint at realms of being, functioning, (sur)realness, but such invisibleness is ever lived out as what I can only describe as an experience of ‘transcendence’ – of all our presumptious and reductive equations of the real – within the immanent. Sublimation in Garouste entails in effect no metaphysical catapulting into some excarnate, unfleshy, un-human ontic time-space. If

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the utopian is ‘the very purpose of painting’ for Gérard Garouste, as he says in the context of his work on Cervantes, it is performed existentially and artistically at ‘daisy-level’, as he puts it so sweetly, speaking this time of his Quixote apocrifo. Ideality is thus lived, thought and dramatised via an art sensing the already infinite abundance of ontic mystery, its wretchednesses, its delights, its sadnesses and its joys, on the plane of the quotidian – a dailiness, moreover, to be thought through and (a)figuratively performed in all of its teeming post-modern supplementarity, that différance somehow pitching human being and doing, as the Ladeys suggest, beyond good and evil. Any purposing towards the ‘divine’, the ‘utopian’, must then be seen to be embraced by what Gérard Georges Lemaire called Garouste’s ‘triumph of aesthetic laughter’. Such laughter, however, conscious of the impact of his ‘poet(h)ics’, as Jean-Claude Pinson might write,9 of uncertainty, ambivalence, unknowing, draws it strength and that ever sought ‘wisdom’ of which Garouste speaks, precisely from a sense of the interconnectedness of things, a fluidity merging the human and the vegetal, the animal too, the male and the female, collapsing the frontiers otherwise separating mind and matter, dream and rationality, madness and normality, the sacred and the comical, relishing, in effect, the stunning porousness of being and doing when one recognises the indivisibleness of ‘antagonistic truths’,10 the sweet plasticity of the latter that an art such as Garouste’s chooses to theatricise. When the artist tells us, in the context of his Vitraux de Notre Dame de Talant, but his words might apply to any ‘reading’ of (the texts of) the world – Dante, Villon, Rabelais, any of the ‘sacred’ texts, but, too, the sun, the night sky, a human face, scene of love or altercation – when, then, Garouste tells us ‘I have sought to denounce the dangers of exegesis’, we see to what extent the purposes of his art disconnect from any form of truth or knowledge not founded on a paradoxical unknowableness, an embrace of the non-absolute. If Garouste’s figural gesture purports to some ‘organising of chaos’, such organisation knows itself to be synonymous with an exploration of an antihierarchy of thought and meaning, and, as such, claims nothing but the antipower of ‘truth’ taking

9

See, for example, Pinson’s Habiter en poète (Champ Vallon, 1995). Gérard Georges Lemaire’s expression.

10


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the plastic form of questions ‘vertiginously reiterated’, as Marc Augé writes. Where does this leave the ‘meaning’ of Gérard Garouste’s considerable oeuvre? Unfinished in more ways than one, unfinishable, ever in some contemplative medias res, ever celebrating itself as precisely ongoing, indefinable, ever reforming-deforming-transforming, richly potential, richly absent. Pierre Cabanne has justly written that Garouste’s is an art ‘where meaning and unmeaning confront each other or meld’. To seek to ‘read’ the 2003-4 Sein-Gérard, one of the many Portraits of the period, is to enter once more the pure theatre of virtual meaning which is yet lived phantasm, swirling desire, plastically revealed in all its sublime mysteriousness. Le Loup et l’échiquier, from the same series, parenthetically titled Portrait de Laurent Dassault, at best – and, of course, deliberately – gives us meaning’s ludicity, its infinite instability, that same phantasmagoricalness that the 1989-91 etchings, all ‘titled’ Sans titre, endlessly, toyingly, spectrally stage. Meaning thus positions itself between loss and possibility, either deemable relative or infinite, and is thus in close affinity with those psychologemes of melancholia and at times near-mystical exuberance, madness and wisdom, that lodge themselves in the psychic atmosphere of Garouste’s work from its beginnings to its latest productions such as L’Ânesse et la figue and La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède. Such loss, looseness of grip, and simultaneously, an always implicit exultation, that together inform the poetics of meaning in Garouste, are to be seen, intuited, by way of example, in the two exquisite 1990 Sans titre oils on canvas (the fifth and the sixth) shown in the Hannover Kunstverein catalogue of 1992. As Marie-José Mondzain has argued in the context of the Portraits of 2003-4, though it is an argument globally pertinent to Garouste’s art, ‘the freedom of meaning, the infiniteness of meanings’ in the latter comes from a ‘distribution of the cards of the possible’. Meaning is thus, in the paintings of Kezive la ville mensonge, where we might have thought biblical text to circumscribe and constrain – meaning is shown to be unfixed, endlessly choreographable, beyond preestablishment or hierarchy. ‘To banish paradox, Garouste tells Hortense Lyon, to refuse confusion, ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning is tantamount to allowing oneself to be reduced to a passive state, remaining somewhat infantile’. To live the flux, the ceaseless shifting of the self’s interpretation of its being-

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with-others/otherness-in-the-world, an experience eminently central to the creation of Garouste’s plastic universe, is thus to accept maturely the giddying, now deeply disturbing, now exhilarating tumultuousness of meaning. The 1984 Nature morte à la femme en bleu opens our eyes to the infinitely dreamable depths within a scene of seeming domesticity; the 1982 La Constellation du chien, with its chromatic power, offers us, as so often, the strange-familiar significance of human doing glimpsed in its unsituatable, purely symbolic dramaticalness plunged in turn into the vast inscrutability of ambient cosmic energies; the truly massive oil on canvas fresco (3.5 x 44m), Les Rives de l’Eunoé, evoking Garouste’s 1988 work on Dante, La Divine Comédie, yet also an Indienne, teems with a wealth of cultural allusion whilst maintaining an at once fantastic and elemental enigmaticalness in the midst of its swelling pregnancy of intertextuality; or there is the 1991 oil titled Le Sourcier, with the whirling energies of dark red-brown or luminous matter in flux and its rough-hewn diviner one feels to be in search of sources greater, more mysterious yet, than water. As Jean-Luc Chalumeau has rightly observed, Garouste’s work deploys its sense of pertinence ‘always between discourses, [it is] associative, transitory’. Meaning becomes a question[ing] of meaning, a provocative exploration of its bubbling multiplicity, its ever resilient withdrawal, its secrecy, an errant tantalisingness far, far in excess of what we might have idly thought were its mere, banal flagrancies.

WINDOWS UPON THE UNSEEN: COLETTE DEBLÉ In the early 1990’s Colette Deblé’s decision ‘to take up the various representations of woman from prehistory to our own time in order to produce a visual analysis of the various postures, situations and stagings’ of the feminine, such a decision foresaw some already vast and magical 888 works. By 2002, over 2000 works were in existence, and le spectacle continue.1 It has not by any means been the sole plastic spectacle Colette Deblé has offered us but it has taken on significant dimensions and, as we shall shortly see, is in various ways intimately related to life-long obsessions. If series it is – Philippe Sénéchal prefers the notion of the kaleidoscope – it bears no particular global title and has grown spontaneously, nomadically and perhaps even unstoppably, from its point of original conception. Individual works, such as Hippolyte Flandrin: La Florentine, with its characteristic delicately transformative and intermingling wash colourings, or Laurent de la Hyre: Les joueuses de dés,2 with its striking highly selective portrayal of one only of the women players, or, yet again, the angel-eagle-priestess image of the ancient Sumerian Lilith, such works may frequently bear no date of personal composition, nor, as with other works of this immense (un)series, any title other than those details of the name of the painter or sculptor or photographer cited, his (or, most rarely, for obvious historical reasons, her) original title, plus, normally, its date of composition. This citational mode of Colette Deblé’s is, of course, utterly unliteral, as she has herself stressed, for it decontextualises in gently stripping away accoutrements and landscapes, and thus resituating feminine presence within, as it were, its strict, uncluttered and concentrated interiority. That said, to cite, as Jean-Joseph Goux has rightly suggested, reveals a complex agenda of performance, convocation, judgement. If there is in this great envol des femmes – it is the title of the book in which Goux’s long essay ap-

1

See Selected Bibliography. No personal website, but certain materials may be viewed online. 2 I shall, throughout, title Colette Deblé’s works by including, wherever given, the name of the artist cited.

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pears, with, happily, Antoinette Fouque’s publishing house, Des femmes – if there is, then incontrovertibly, admiration and reverence in regard to the astonishing range of plastic creativity the history of art reveals to us, and that Colette Deblé’s own work allows us so frequently to rediscover, to unearth and appreciate in its own light, so is there equally, subtly, yet pressingly, that ‘visual analysis’, that breaking down, that fracturing of the images of art’s past (and, even, present), a shrewd prising open of the practice and underlying ‘theory’, or consciousness, of the relation of the artist to his – almost invariably his – model: woman. To cite, to summon and critically, analytically, to perform, let us say, Boucher’s Jeune fille se reposant, this in 1997, or, in 2002, Poussin’s Vénus, is to do a number of things simultaneously: 1. Deblé re-minds, puts us in mind once again, with regard to great art, its shifting techniques and modal idiosyncrasies; 2. in this, her work is a highly diversified homage to other artists and the infinite range of doing and seeing art’s history has unfolded; 3. such a homage, however, seeks to show, by virtue of what Deblé now omits and downplays of the original, something of the implicit nature(s) of the male gaze focussed down the ages on female presence; 4. in this appropriative relation of seer to seen, the plastic passiveness of the model dovetails seamlessly with the domination of the artist’s perception and projection; 5. in Deblé’s work the latter effects fall away, are voided: we are no longer concerned with male imagination, its pleasures and indulgences channelled though they so often have been through matching and innovative rigorous aesthetic discipline; 6. Deblé thus evokes the gap between subject-artist and object-model, a gap we may not see in the original, which art’s perfect closing in upon itself, its own definitiveness, its seeming absoluteness, inevitably occults; 7. the ‘visual analysis’ we have heard Colette Deblé speak of, thus sets up a trembling, shimmering between-space, one of erasure, absence, and creation, new presence; 8. this newness, which is the work proper of Colette Deblé’s plastic gesture in this vast series/unseries of paintings, contains, of course, new implicit vision, its images convey new perceptions, are new projections, and this is accomplished in turn by new personal techniques designed to render palpable such newnesses of vision we may in turn be brought to see in her work; 9. Deblé has argued the latter constitutes a ‘journal’ and, no doubt, we may read this not just as a reminder of the quasi-compulsive dailiness of her démarche, but also as a hint as to the provisionality of

Windows Upon the Unseen: Colette Deblé

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the latter, its refusal of, perhaps, the very closure any image, as Yves Bonnefoy will tell us, tends, fatally, to invite us to see in it – it is, perhaps once again, in this light that the artist likes to see her own work as akin to those ‘primitive’, knowing-unknowing, sacred-agnostic projections on the cave walls of Lascaux, and, not dissimilarly, Jacques Derrida’s insistence on the metaphoricity of Deblé’s use of the lavis, with its “washing away” and revealing new of new prégnances, new absent-present fullnesses – such an insistence should not encourage us to see the prégnances of Colette Deblé’s oeuvre as absolutes, but rather as what, elsewhere, Derrida has termed ‘remainders’, traces ultimately wrapped in a deferral of their discourse.3 Critics such as Jean-Luc Chalumeau and Michèle Gazier have sought better to characterise the portrayals of women for which Colette Deblé has opted, either by proposing large groupings – ‘saints, heroines, martyrs, allegories and mothers’, Chalumeau writes, his other categories being women as representing social or political power, women as seducers – all the Eves, Venuses, Suzannes, women as neutral or decorative physical presences – or by listing the real or implicit roles, activities or circumstances of the women evoked. The problem, if we can call it that, of such an approach, is that it lays emphasis on precisely what Deblé erases, implicitly privileging the orig-inal works rather than Deblé’s transformations which, let me quickly stress, such critics are yet utterly alert to. What Margarete Zimmermann has called Deblé’s new ‘Cité des Dames’ or, as Marc Ange Graff writes, her ‘Féminaire’, this clearly is our deeper concern despite the tremblé effect and Deblé’s muted ode to other art, and this concern takes us far beyond martyr and virgin (even Mary), beyond goose-herding and cherry-picking, to something, yes, within the body, physical, sensual, but ineffable too, of the spirit, of the very mystery of incarnation, an identity, simply, subtly, to take one’s breath away. For the ‘truth’ or ‘truths’ that such painting unveils remain consciously shadowy, flickering like images in some Japanese theatre, inaugural and sublimely allusive without the congealments of prophesy or gnosis. A profound

3

Please see Derrida’s essay on Deblé, translated by Andrew Rothwell. For a further discussion of the notion of the ‘remainder’, see my The Endless Theory of Days. The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel (Rodopi, 2007), in particular the section devoted to Cartouches.

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unsaidness, indeed unsayableness, emanates from Deblé’s two differently fabricated remakes of Rodin’s celebrated Le Baiser, for example, or that of Egon Schiele’s Femme blonde couchée (1914) or again the transformations wrought upon Jules Machard’s Séléné (5 août 1874, 8 avril 1878). One is reminded of that zone of silence into which Marguerite Duras’ female protagonist has withdrawn in Le Ravisssement de Lol. V. Stein, a withdrawal and an unspeakableness that yet are a given revelation of some ontological intrinsicalness that, though beyond language, yet is a maximal, mutely eloquent minimum. From the museum of muses given us by artists from as far back as 3000 BC – the Idole, Tell Brak Deblé remodels – to Goya’s La Maja desnuda and Picasso’s Nu de face aux bras levés – we move into that art of re-musing, a-musing, unmuzzling and analytical visual perusing that is Colette Deblé’s. An art not resynthesising, if by synthesis one implies a coherent systematized counter-discourse, though superbly able, via its own strictly plastic modes, now somewhat ascetic, subdued, now lush, glittering with an original chromatic sensuousness, to give us an oeuvre of vastly diverse self-concordance and inner harmony. If, then, the original works chosen by Deblé to be rethought and remade constitute not just a history of female representation but simultaneously a history of plasticity, of art’s materiality, then her contribution to this continually unfolding story of pure plastic means and manners must, taking stock alone of the over 2000 paintings created in this (un)series, be deemed considerable and genially distinctive. Before moving on to examine issues pertaining to Colette Deblé’s oeuvre such as autobiography and selflessness, the deep subject of painting, her conception of art’s feasibilities and aspirations, and offering along the way, a discussion of the full range of her modes, from her ‘art that is not art’ to her boîtes-fenêtres, her fougères, or her peauésies – before this, then, it will be useful to query further certain matters arising from our initial foray into Deblé’s plastic universe. Much, in effect, may be said to centre around the conception of woman that is Deblé’s and that we may feel can be ours from gazing upon her work. To move, however, back through the paintings, drawings and washes of the past nineteen or so years, to the acrylic flowers and birds, of the early 1990’s and late 1980’s, the acrylics on canvas such as the various Fougères (1987) or Pacifique modèle (1986) or ‘Please repeat Agnès’ (1985), and further back still to the boîtes-fenêtres-


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dessins of the mid-1970’s, and, finally, to the usually parenthesised or forgotten ‘non-drawings’ she discusses in depth with Bernard Noël in Milles fois dedans – to operate this vast visual and mental peregrination is to realise the full complexity of this conception, hers, as well, inevitably, as ours. How, for example, shall we conceive what we have to this point seen as Deblé’s peeling away of the various thick coatings applied to the female by the male painter, in light of the various declarations and avowals made in her 1993 Lumière de l’air, where we hear her speak of ‘the women of my family [who] seemed to me so monstrous that, at eleven, I wanted to die’? How shall we dovetail the desire, manifest in her great (un)series beginning in the 1990’s, to explore the unsaid and the unpainted in the representation of women – via an art of such delicate unsaying and unpainting –, how shall we dovetail this with such perception, and moreover, an ongoing obsession with feminine form – ‘monstrous, enormous, mammalian’, nothing but ‘an ocean of huge caressing hanging, moving, stifling breasts’? Just how visceral is what we may think of now as a kind of purging of female presence of its raw physiology in favour of its vastly overlooked and so often, and today still, as a Calixte Beyala or a Mariama Bâ will tell us, trampled subtle affectivity and deep spirituality? Certainly, male representation, in art as elsewhere, explains this, but what shall we make of the eleven-year-old’s reaction: acculturation? recognition of the female acquiescence in self-images foisted by male dominance? fear of ‘falling infinitely [into some portrait of unhappy woman]’, as she writes? Whilst love and tenderness have clearly been major factors in Colette Deblé’s life experience – I shall return to this ultimately –, the reality/metaphor of ‘penetration’ she can readily generalise, both positively and negatively. Penetration is what our senses do, our sight especially, it allows a movement towards the other, an entry into his, her or its universe, a convergence, a fusion of sorts; but, too, such penetration may constitute intrusion, an exploitation, a violation even, of our openness, our perhaps sensed exposure and vulnerability. It is easy to sense the impact such equations may have upon Deblé’s conception of woman, the complexities it may generate and that bury themselves not just, moreover, in the work on the ‘representations of woman [in art], the various postures, situations, stagings’ that are (not truly) hers, but, too, in Deblé’s portrayal of flowers understood to be the plant’s sexual organs, in her Fougères and other acrylics where self-portraiture is at stake, and, of course, in

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those neither erotic nor pornographic, she argues, ‘non-drawings’ that yet remain so striking and which we are offered in Mille fois dedans. And, we may ask ourselves, our eyes flitting over her work of a lifetime, is not all of this, with the issues of identity it implies and the ‘unthinkable’ logic of the body hovering about it, somehow tied into Colette Deblé’s perception-conception of what can, and cannot, be held to be beautiful? Certainly, she tells Bernard Noël, there was a time when aestheticism was felt to open the ‘gate to all and every complacency’: it was that trap of the pure, idealised image that could so easily mask one’s experience of the real, of Bonnefoy’s ‘presence’, one may assume – and which he himself thus feels compelled, in an intitial gesture, to ‘trample’ and ‘destroy’. Beauty, thus seen, is a temptation to be resisted, and one may feel that many a painting – Goya’s La Maja desnuda, say, or Gleyre’s Vénus Pandémos, FantinLatour’s L’Or du Rhin or even, just possibly, Flandrin’s La Florentine – Deblé takes up and modifies, was, in the original, an aesthetic selfindulgence, an extravagant phantasm. She adds, however, that she now ‘accept[s] the risk of beauty’, no doubt sensing its natural right to be recognised and even, possibly, understanding its infinite range, its indefinableness, its capacity to reveal itself in the fragmented, the partial, seemingly the imperfect, conceivably Baudelairian ‘ugliness’, her own ‘monstrousness’ – in brief, not merely in what we may deem to be perfect form, but in all that is, all of being’s, and doing’s, infinite forms.4 This, of course, would ally itself to that logic of fusion, undifferentiation, aesthetico-spiritual deferral I shall come back to. And perhaps we can see it in her ‘remakes’ of the Anonyme: Vénus (II-III siècles) or the Béotie, terre cuite archaïque, where we are far from the curvaceous and harmoniously balanced forms that Deblé’s Yoshiko Ishikawa: Larmes d’amour (2004) yet continues, acceptingly, if I can thus echo Deblé’s nuance, to render most manifest. The question of feminism inevitably arises in an oeuvre beginning with the ‘non-drawings’ of Mille fois dedans and reaching a 4

As Thoreau has suggested somewhere, ‘the perception of beauty is a moral test’. One may see it therefore as requiring a traversal of its visibleness, a penetration of form and a ‘visionary’ experience of invisibleness, of unmaskedness, that full and awing mystery of total beingness. All great art moves in the direction of an embrace of existential contradiction and contrast. One may think of, say, work as diverse as that of Gabriel Garcia Márquez or that of the Indian poet A.K.Ramanujan.


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present climax with the 2000-plus works devoted to, yet radically modifying, art’s historic representation of women. Just to what degree can we attach to Colette Deblé’s painting the abiological logic of a Simone de Beauvoir, the reclaiming of the ghoulish in a Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray’s uncovering of the sociologico-philosophical discourse that falsely images the feminine, Assia Djebar’s struggle to free women from the severe feudalities that still men can persist in imposing, Monique Wittig’s ‘guerrilla’ war that the Manastabal of Virgile, non suggests is better transformed into an ‘active passion’ rather than an haranguing? Claude and Françoise Lelièvre have seen in Deblé’s work on the representation of women a vast ‘political allegory’, and it is not difficult to adhere to such thinking, although Deblé herself wonders to what extent ‘women can remain an allegory when a woman is the painter: when it is a woman painter who is re-drawing [woman] and re-designating her’. Chalumeau terms Colette Deblé’s art a maieutic art, a subtle Socratic art, we may see it as, ever questioning so as to give birth in the other to his or her unconscious, to date veiled and buried, thinking – with respect to women, that is. In that sense the feminineness/feminism of work such as the Oeuvre d’un proche de Primatice: Enlèvement d’Hélène or the peauésie titled Lydia Harambourg: Surprise par le regard d’Actéon usurps the usual masculine dominance and becomes the force, as Goux writes, that ‘marks, [...], inseminates, [...] informs, impos[ing] upon the virginalness of the support the figures of its graphic design[ation]’. This said, never can we maintain that Colette Deblé’s art, from beginning to end, seeks a re-representation offering fixed, categorical, ideologised, or even somewhat stably philosophical or sociologised conceptualisation. Hers is an oeuvre that queries, wonders, avoids self-theorisation, sensing deep elemental strangeness, paradoxes and mysteries at the heart of that ontological knot only an individuated woman can both tie, with her own beingness, and, sometimes, unravel to experience its pure, liberated unsayableness. Even, surely, an early (1976) boîte-fenêtre-dessin such as that accompanying Goux`s fine essay of 2006, and despite its seemingly utterly un-remadeness – surely even such a creation subtly hints at the profound enigma lying beneath thick layerings that mask the deep, as yet undiscovered, other realness that is this, and perhaps somewhere, every woman’s.

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That Colette Deblé’s oeuvre, despite its ‘disappearance’ into its own strict plastic interiority, rides on a myriad of issues of selfidentity and autobiographical pertinence – autobiography: the graphic display of the body, the bios, of the self – is disputed neither by the artist herself nor by her major commentator, Jean-Joseph Goux. To read the two early interviews with Bernard Noël is to be mightily struck by the at once visceral and spiritual dimension of her poiein, her creativity, even though she dismisses, despite Noël’s shaky halfprotest, the latter’s product as aesthetically non-achieving, inabouti, non-art. The various Fougères or similar works of a slightly later period such as Voir (1991), operate a kind of mise en abyme involving the somewhat veiled self’s gaze turned upon equally veiled others, this through a separating yet possibilising window, that, implicitly, of art itself, an art seeking, gazing, penetrating, half-revealing. And, inevitably, for the viewer of, say, Deblé’s magnificent 2002 Philippe de Champaigne: Le Ravissement de Sainte Madeleine – painted twice, as if a double-take were, as indeed it may be deemed to be, as necessary as if we were reading Duras’ already evoked unravellable Ravishing of Lol Stein – how can we not be sensitive to Deblé’s statement that seeing is always, somehow, a seeing of self. So that painting, as well as the ultimate display of its product, in galleries and museums, becomes fatally that act of self-exhibition that so obsesses Deblé – an act at once indiscreet, showing the hidden, what ‘ought not to be seen’, as she writes in Colette Deblé. Défloraisons, yet, equally, intensely appropriate, for, though it exposes the secret, the normally unconfessed – a logic running all the way through her work – such deliberately disturbing exposure is coextensive with an exhibition, as she says, of a ‘love of painting’, and, of course, its complicatedly caressive act. A deeply affecting ‘act of presence’, in effect, that equally reveals ‘my absence in death’s beyond’. It is indisputable, of course, that the nondrawings of Mille fois dedans exhibit the drawn body of self, but it is essential, I believe, to respect Colette Deblé’s strictly artistic disavowal of them – precisely to the degree that the secrets they may be said to reveal are not of the order of those central to her aesthetico-spiritual sensibility, which allows , as she powerfully tells us, to ‘show what one cannot see: /the absence of God / the jubilation of living / the rising of sap / the energy of time / the emotion of light’. Certainly, these non-drawings imply an insistent discourse on self, its self-violation, via a phantasmatic distortion; certainly, there is the will to expel ‘the


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intolerable’, to overcome the trauma of viewing pornographic images, and perhaps even – at Noël’s insistence – confess to a drawing-asmasturbation, a strange self-avoidance, and yet an embrace of the manifest ambiguities swarming within. But it remains that, auto-biographical as these non-drawings are, they cannot, for Colette Deblé, constitute the art she already knows to be burgeoning within her, in its no less complex true recognisableness. An aesthetically and spiritually critical divide, an honestly embraced paradoxicality within, can thus be said to be borne in upon Colette Deblé’s consciousness of her doing, her plastic démarche. She can speak of the received notion of the ‘sin’ of feminine hair, of feelings of guilt in connection with desires beyond thought or reason, purely of the bios. And she muses as to the relationship of desire to the ‘body of the other’, even to the point of looking through one (female) body ‘in order to see another’. And at all moments there remains in her consciousness – her conscience, too, to the extent that an ethics may be said to merge with/emerge from her aesthetics – that at once troubling yet, at moments, exhilarating equation: seeing = seeing self. Seeing her own mother’s exposed sex, however, sends the childartist scurrying off to draw in the sand so as to bury the image, as Deblé tells us in all simplicity in Lumière de l’air. And if the sexual organs of the many women she depicts/remakes, from the early boîtesfenêtres to works such as Camille Claudel: La Vague or Anonyme: Néréide, Égypte, VIe, or even, Egon Schiele: Femme blonde couchée (1914), lose their physiological blatancy in a larger meditative embrace of the presence and the body of woman – ‘I draw the women of my intimate heaven’, she can tell us –, yet can she see herself, she maintains, like those women portrayed by Otto Dix. Complex, tensional, unidealised, raw even, and so very mortal. So that there ever remains the risk of ‘falling infinitely’ into some (self-)portrait, some (self-)seeing of the ‘unhappy woman’. It is, yet, but a risk, in what Goux, Deblé herself in agreement, rightly sees as a search, visible in many forms – the flowers and bird paintings, the Fougères, the great ongoing unseries re-presenting women’s presence-in-the-world, but, too, I should argue, even in the non-drawings of Mille fois dedans – for ‘absolute origin’, a ‘lost universe [painting points to]’. And, as elsewhere in the ontology of Deblé’s vision, it is a search revealing a fundamental paradox. A paradox beyond its capacity for generating

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‘happiness’ where an infinite fall into its opposite threatens, a paradox that, then, beyond the dysphoric, can, in the instant of the painting, allow euphoria, the brief ‘utopia [of] stepping outside of selfness’ – when we thought, as did Deblé, that all was contained therein. To gaze, then, upon her beautiful 1990 Pacifique modèle, does it allow some utopian access to a ‘lost world’ of fusion, Oneness, where self is dissipated into a vastness of mutual embrace? The rain of light partially obliterating the seen, does it allow for a penetration into something of that ‘original world’, as she calls it, perhaps that ‘absolute origin’ of Goux, where the bathing naked self and the foaming sea, the illuminated sand and sky and earth merge in some strangely visible ‘invisibleness’ beyond any narrow selfness of their seeming, and lived, identitites? We may, indeed, think so, for much in Colette Deblé’s plastic work is of the ineffable, and her sparse but thoughtful observations on such work would delicately induce such thinking. Visual analysis of the visual theatre of art’s history of representation of the feminine we have seen to be the principle focus of Colette Deblé’s most recent, and major, plastic project. An exploration of questions of perception and image, in effect, ‘by plastic means only’, she clarifies. And, it is important to notice, this exploration extends, not just to works such as Poussin: Enlèvement des Sabines (1998), but right back to the non-drawings of Mille fois dedans (where her own produced images and the perceptual power behind them in relation to her conception of what art somehow must be are precisely queried), through the work on the boîte-fenêtre-dessin (where grills and mirrors complexify seeing and the seeable and demand we witness such complexifications), to the very fine large acrylic Voir, already evoked (and clearly wrestling, we might reasonably think, with plasticity`s very capacity to visualise anything at all). Such an art thus explores and moves with, yet beyond, history and even the history of art’s representations, and the reason for this is clearly Colette Deblé’s understanding of the deep subject of painting. Goux nicely points to this in contemplating the Fougères and similar canvases, noting that there is a ‘secret meteorology’ at play, reminding us that it is not so much ‘raining’ – it is raining paint, the impersonal il peint parenthetically conveying something of that tensionality of which I have spoken thrusting auto-bio-graphy up against transcendence of selfness. To look at Ilys (1991) or Pirat (1991), both acrylic on canvas flowers, is to appreciate


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that mimesis is not truly an issue: the emergence of a plastic materiality supercedes. Similarly, in, purely by way of example, the Hans Memling: Maria Portinari, (vers 1470) wash, whilst refocusing via an elimination that re-agendas, Deblé perhaps above all shows us that, indeed, the most striking element of this work is its offering to us of painting qua painting – the work within the work, the subject of the work, that is its art, its material workedness. Deblé, speaking of her portrayals of flowers - one could draw attention to her exquisite acrylic Thésa –, writes as follows: ‘The subject is painting’s alibi; it is its air, both the appearance it gives itself and the air in which painting breathes’. In short, the real subject of painting is painting. The different peauésies (de l’Adour: Colette Deblé’s address) - let us have in mind, by way of example, the lovely Surprise par le regard d’Actéon, done with Lydia Harambourg’s text – are alibis for a shared poeticity, a shared poiein, that far transcends anything flatly discursive, bindingly ideational and, most certainly, sociopolitical, that we may seek to attach to them: the gaze of Acteon is, ultimately, ‘that of painting’ itself. And ‘for what image?’: the question no doubt can only receive an infinity of responses. Colette Deblé, once more from the early days of Mille fois dedans – and she will forgive me for dipping so frequently into a (yet crucial, seminal) conversation about ‘non-art’ – shows a deep, and just, fascination with the ‘invisibleness’, as she puts it, of what is drawn or painted, a ‘mental’ dimension beyond art’s forms yet experienced through the latter.5 Art’s surface subject matter, Acteon, let us say, or the carrying off of the Sabine women, and, further, the embedded subjectivity of self-investment in such matter, neither can obviate the pure, quasi-anonymous sublimeness that the painting qua painting exudes. It is this sublimity that is the invisibleness Deblé has in mind. When she tells us that, ‘in a painting, my happiness [is] to be the waves, [etc.]’; when she tells us that she is then what she sees, that she becomes, her being is, painting, we must appreciate that this becoming, this being, is of the order of the invisibleness that so haunts her. To feel, as she adds, still in Lumière de l’air, ‘the weight of [painting’s] colour making and unmaking the image’, the seeableness of a painting, is to enter the realm of the ‘unlimited’, to experience its spiritual, ontological unseeableness. Take, for example, the wash im5 ‘I have drawn the invisible’, she says in Mille fois dedans; and, in Lumière de l’air, she speaks of the ‘analogy between the space of the visual and that of the mental’.

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ages offered us, in Femmes contées, of Marguerite de Valois or Louise Michel: neither are pinned down by what we know of these two celebrated women, we are moved beyond the vis-ible; rational ‘visual analysis’, whilst eminently feasible, and deployed and invited, equally slips away as we enter the strangeness of plasticity’s pure intrinsicalness and the unsayable world and ontos hovering about these superbly shadowy unrepresentations. And, similarly, Colette Deblé’s ever so delicate Cithariste, (Villa de Publius Fannius Synistor) leaps beyond painting’s flat, though endless speakableness to invite our investment of a non-space and a non-time buried in the ineffable invisibleness the painting’s speckled washed hues, its ambient spotting and its pure rose absences nevertheless guarantee. The materials, the techniques and modes of production of Colette Deblé’s art are relatively classic, though the manners to which they are made to apply themselves have various discreet elements of originality. We are far – let us consider some contemporary women artists initially – from the bullet-riddled beginnings of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work, far too from her early oils on plywood such as Scorpion and Stag crammed with tiny objects, fragments of china and coffee beans, perhaps in sympathy with the great Nanas that will emerge, even though, in pure plastic terms, the latter do not coincide with Deblé’s delicate washes, acrylics and use of coloured pigments. We are, of course, no less far from the constituent matter and modes of plastic fabrication manifest in Louise Bourgeois’ or Annette Messager’s work, despite their penchant for drawing: no plaster or marble limbs, no vast installations wrapping the viewer round in the teeming, suffo-cating clutter of endless glass, stone, metal or cloth objects, found or hand-crafted. Geneviève Asse may demand of herself a classical, though modernly abstractive use of canvas and paint, and there is great subtlety, as we shall soon see, in her plastic modulation, but there is none of the lightness, the quick sprightliness to be found in Deblé’s ultimately preferred mode, the lavis, with its very different conceived values.6 Needless to say, though the (complex) logic of self-exhibition at the heart of Sophie Calle’s work is no doubt of pertinence and interest in contemplating the démarche of Colette Deblé, photography, film, the literal staging of the self’s body and presence, 6

Please see infra for an analysis of Geneviève Asse’s oeuvre.


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the flagrancy of interaction with the other, none of such modes of engendering plasticity – filmic or photographic traces – are those to which Deblé applies herself.7 And, if, too, the materials and modes of production at play in certain works by Danièle Perronne – to which we shall so soon offer our attention – works such as her boîtes or her as yet unexhibited journal with its at times delicate use of watercolour – if, there, echoes may be found, as also in her use of acrylics in the canvases Bernard Noël and Pierre Garnier have rightly lauded, yet does the art, qua art, materially and processually, of Colette Deblé continue to not readily dovetail with that of her contemporaries.8 I shall not dwell on the distinctiveness that becomes apparent if we contrast matter and technique, process and plastic product, of Deblé with those of Ben Vautier or Jean-Pierre Pincemin, or even the painting alone of a François Morellet, a Gérard Garouste, a Martial Raysse or a Claude Viallat. To the extent that Alexandre Hollan often privileges gouaches, watercolours and acrylics, clearly there are modal affinities at play with Deblé’s material processes, and Gérard Titus-Carmel’s large arsenal equally, almost inevitably, contains various of the subtle elements of plastic fabrication developed by Deblé.9 But then, before turning our final attention to a consideration of the global logic underpinning Colette Deblé’s work, let us visit, compactly, of necessity, the full range of her production to better appreciate something of the specificities of its material, technical modalities. And, to begin more or less at the beginning, those troublesome ‘non-drawings’ of Mille fois dedans. ‘Pictographs’, Deblé terms them, line drawings altogether too readable to warrant in her eyes the label of art; drawings offering a distortion of the real, of real sexual feasibility, and therefore marking an ‘impossibleness [...] of complete communication’ and, more importantly, though ambiguously, a refusal to see what perhaps yet she desired to see. Simple, stark lines, with darkly or les flagrantly shaded and coloured sections marking sexual 7

For an analysis of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, of Annette Messager, of Louise Bourgeois and of Sophie Calle, the reader may consult my Contemporary French Art 1 (Rodopi, 2008). 8 Please see infra for a discussion of Danièle Perronne’s work. 9 All of these artists, along with others, are examined in either volume 1 or volume 2 of Contemporary French Art.

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organs (usually the penis) or limbs, hands, feet, hair. Drawings/nondrawings produced in a matter of a few days and, perhaps tellingly, almost never in the two interviews with Bernard Noël, occasioning discussion of the strictly material, plastic dimension of their fabrication and reality. The boîtes-fenêtres-dessins, begun a couple of years later, and bearing no distinguishing (sub-)titles, do, however, draw some consideration. Jean-Luc Chalumeau is particularly taken with the intricacy both of such work as work and of its conceptualisation. In the 1977 catalogue to the exhibition Mythologies quotidiennes II at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Colette Deblé waxes eloquent: ‘Inside, what passes by – dailiness. The very thing one would like to firmly grasp and which, seized, would become mythological. The window is at once frame and transformer. No centre, just sides: a tomb, thrown wide open’. Later, in Lumière de l’air, she adds: ‘In my boîtes, space multiplies and contracts as in one’s mind, but the inside of the boîte is an outside, in which the use of a mirror-paper reflects both the inside (the back of the drawing) and the outside (the viewer caught in his or her own gazing’. From the fine drawings and ‘sculpted’ assemblages of the boîtes-fenêtres-dessins to the thirty-three acrylics on canvassed frame of the 1987 Fougères series, “a difference” as Michel Deguy writes of the passage from his Poèmes de la presqu’île to his Biefs, and on the surface a radical one. From material and chromatic sobriety Deblé moves to a sensuous explosion of multicoloured paint. If, as Yves Bonnefoy suggests, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s own shift from graphic starkness to colour and the vegetal forms such colour inscribes, can be said to constitute something of a return from form and its concepts to the experience of ‘presence’,10 then the vibrant Fougères, it may be argued, plunge into the ontic fullness such a significant aesthetic modulation implies. Colette Deblé speaks of such a quasi-idyllic immersion ‘in the nostalgia of the time when one had time and when body and nature knew one another’. Pleasure, fusion, love are the terms used to describe such experience and, if Deblé still clings to the conceptualisations that would link the Fougères work to the boîtesfenêtres-dessins – ‘Fougères [..] is, too, the character of a novel of 10

See Bonnefoy’s essay in Feuillées (Le Temps qu’il fait, 2004).


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mirrors [...] Mirror window, mirror character’ – she deems this new work to be in the tradition of Bonnard and others ‘of my country’: ‘painters of the happiness of living, of the happiness of painting’. Such inseparable joys of pure plasticity, vibrant acrylic chromatics and life’s, the body’s, the mind’s, exhilaration in pure doing, in being this doing, this poiein, can readily be seen to continue in the diversifications offered in pseudo-fougères, if I may express myself in that way, such as the 1991 Thésa or Bao or the Sans titre of the same year. Bird paintings such as Rieuses give us transparency, a pristine, almost childlike elementariness, vaguely reminiscent of Braque but with sharper images, some clinging to the real, others, the majority, impressionistic, reduced to basic forms, and ever dominated by the sky-blue paint in whose medium they move and float. The flowers are more luscious, sensual, even sexual à la Georgia O’Keefe. They overflow the canvas; there is no effort to isolate blooms in some traditional representational fashion, as, for example, in Monet’s Fleurs dans un vase de cristal. Certainly, these are flowers – far more so than Dali’s Flowers for Gala or Picasso’s truly and delightfully ‘infantile’ 1961 Fleurs –, but, as Jean-Luc Chalumeau so rightly says, their deep identity is ‘simply painting’. The term défloraisons has been used, and accepted by Colette Deblé herself, in free reference not to just such flower works, but also implicitly to the major work to come on the representation of women. Its value therefore becomes multiple, but in all cases reminds us of the primacy of painting, the lure and fallacy of a figur-ation seeking directly to designate, and thus limit, the real. All of the elements of technique and conception that will come to characterise the 2000 and more works on women – omission, undetailedness, fragmentation, incompletion, erasure, simplification, non-contextualisation, blurring, speckling, and so on – can be seen to be at play in one way or another in the 1985-91 works from Fougères to Fleurs. Women disappear in order to reappear; their male floralness is deflowered to make room for the new, ‘washed’ and unnamed, de-named grace and subtlety of a femaleness perhaps unsayable. The Peauésies de l’Adour continue Deblé’s work on what we might see as the secret, unspoken and, at root, unspeakable ontology of women, but the many works of the, to date, three series, go further in embracing not only the other of woman, but also the other that is the writer, whose text is seen not just as readable material but also, even primarily, as a visual phenomenon whereby hand-writing somehow fuses with hand-painting.

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Writers such as Claire Malroux, Salah Stétié, Régine Detambel, Michel Butor, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Dupin and Isabelle Rome – some seventy or so, as I write – have thus collab-orated with Deblé in this creative dovetailing of poetry and painted skin-like paper offering extremely limited and delicate manuscripts. Such work, in turn, may be presented as livres d’artiste in very varyingly limited editions. ‘I like those love stories à trois, Deblé tells us, between author, publisher and painter, stories that involve the recognition of the work of the other, making it live and exist, inscribing it in the logic of time that grows and flowers within a book’. Artisanal work, hand-crafted, ever unique, organic, rooted in the impulse to join, to cocreate, the fleshy and mental ‘externalised experience’ of relative fusion and a ‘movement [that] is meaning’. In Lumière de l’air Colette Deblé calls to our attention the most curious paradox of giving oneself over to an activity that, taking the vastness of one’s experience of reality, yet metamorphoses such immensity into ‘a few bits of colour’. In conclusion of this study of an oeuvre spanning some thirty-five years I should like to offer a few compact observations on this paradox, its improbable sense, the fundamental logic behind Deblé’s art that allows such seeming reductiveness to swell with pertinence. I shall proceed, as from time to time elsewhere, and out of felt necessity, in point form: 1: if Deblé can maintain that ‘the only question for the painter is what did s/he see’, and if all art may be deemed, as critics such as Dominique Grandmont as well as Deblé herself suggest, a window upon being – including the sex organs, she will not, and of course rightly, hesitate to emphasise in Mille fois dedans – then we must equally be alert to her sense of the problematics of seeing as we gaze through the endless windows opening without and within; 2: in effect, to gaze is to see only a certain available visibleness, hence the limits of representation, the sought glimpsing, at once physiological and mental, of being’s deeper subtleties, the sense that painting occurs in order to see ‘what one cannot see’, as Deblé writes in Défloraisons – it is thus not surprising that:


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3: Jean-Joseph Goux can speak of a painterly logic that is entr’optique ou alléloscopique, the sightings of the eye behind painting’s gesture finding themselves ever between, in conflictual reciprocity, in a sense in a no-(wo)man’s land, that yet is at the heart of an unsituatable, unrepresentable being – it is no wonder that Deblé can be led to say that ‘my hand works blind’; 4: it is in this way that art, in exceeding, or receding from, the blatancies of the visible that yet fascinate and call to us, may accede to its, for Colette Deblé, required ‘mythologicalness’, its capacity to transcend particularity whilst emerging from it – the artist thus becomes not the reproducer of the real, but the latter’s mythographer, exploring beyond the describable, the finite, seeking to sense the limitless: ‘the ocean, the desert, painting’, Deblé so aptly writes, in a perfect tautology; 5: such a logic of the plastic, of poiein, implies a liberation lived as a release from, firstly, what may be felt as the constraining identity of self (all the way from self-dislike to narcissism), and, secondly, the seeming already- saidness of the real – again, a release into the infinite unsayableness/recreatableness of all that is – is, that is, in its ever unfolding, unfoldable mystery, in all that ever remains, as Bonnefoy has written, ‘in excess of the sign’; 6: undoubtedly, for Colette Deblé, art, potentially, momentarily at least, may offer the sense of fusion, the experience of love and happiness she has never stopped speaking of in its connection: art’s purpose is then spiritual, psychological, close to ethical in that it suggests modes of (self-)perception allowing a revaluing of the being of self, of other, of all that, given its penetration of the consciousness of the paintingdoing-re-doing self, only seems other, but is, in effect, flower, bird, light, colour, woman, text of the other, etc, etc, endlessly

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fusable, mergeable, with self and its (non-)otherness in that ‘liquid unity’ her art dreams of;11 7: designare, a verb, an action, giving for Deblé, simultaneously, interchangeably, dessin and dessein: art, that is, intrinsically coextensive with purpose, containing its own existential, ontic, logic – and miming, in effect, the deep, perhaps strange, even blinding purpose at the heart of all doing, all (self-)fabrication –, art, beyond its doubts which certainly can arise for Deblé, ever pointing to, designating, the value, the faceless, ‘mythological’ pertinence of its own mystery, its ‘silence’ which is, as Derrida writes, a prégnance, a presence and a future, ever, as Christian Gabrielle Guez-Ricord has suggested, mediating, ever metamorphosing. An art by design, by self-designation, brimming with a purpose it alone speaks, beyond words.

11 Perhaps at best the final product of art may lead to a certain satisfaction, but the relaunching of desire, predicated, as René Char and Pierre Reverdy have argued, on the return of felt lack, absence, emptiness, suggests that the happiness of fusion depends not upon ‘product’, the producedness of art, but rather upon process, continuity, the unfinishable theoria of poiein.

THE LIGHT OF DEATH, A SACREDNESS OF DOING: GEORGES ROUSSE In 1981 Georges Rousse set up a pseudo-studio in an abandoned warehouse and proceeded to create a work of photographic traces called, with extreme unpretentiousness, Entrepôt Vichy. Behind, and supporting, such residual photographic traces, lie two equally significant phenomena: the original space now occupied, ‘invaded’ Cocteau liked to think of all artistic intervention (seeing it very far from the ‘evasion’ many may deem at the centre of art’s practice), and the painting investing, covering, half-covering, the sordid realness of the derelict, the degraded human createdness let go and now seized hold of at the very point of its final ruin, rethought, re-injected with another human creation: a wild, improbable painting of walls and staircases, offering them life, human figures no less, where death and humanity seemed to have deserted them. ‘Reassuring and worrisome’, Philippe Piguet characterises such a gesture: reassuring, no doubt, precisely for its reanimation of the moribund, its caress of the leprous, its bold return of colour and dynamic figuration to the drab and the inert, its leap out of the filth into the ultimate ‘hygiene’ of photography;1 worrisome, it is safe to say, because, above all, such spaces entail risk of a varying nature for the solitary adventurer. ‘Jubilation’, as Rousse tells us, ‘before the wall’, yes; but, too, physical vulnerability, the sheer rawness confronting one’s doing, materially and climatalogically. And, in all of this, and lest we think that Rousse’s gesture constitutes a rebellious embrace of ‘bad painting’, we should remember that here we have an artist never forgetful rather, as he tells Jocelyne Lupien, of the insertion of his own faire, his own ‘doing’, within the great and

1 The notion of ‘hygiene’ can more broadly be taken as applicable to a logic whereby all art may be deemed to abstract itself from the intense lived immediacy of existence, its ‘mal’, its suffering, its violent contrastiveness, its rawness, establishing via this Baudelairian and Mallarméan idealisation, an ‘inner’ purity and an untouchable beauty over and above any tiresome earthy referentiality that may linger.

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long tradition of art, from El Greco and Géricault to Matisse and Picasso.2 Let us take a look at a couple of other works as we ease our way into a plastic universe on the surface so very different from that of, say, a Gérard Garouste, a Martial Raysse or a Geneviève Asse: the 2003 Varsovie series, firstly, then the 1992 Bratislava works, followed by the 1999 Miyota photographic ensemble. Like all of Rousse’s work, Varsovie offers a collection of photographs sandwiched between, but spilling out from, given place and painterly and/or architectural intervention in, on, and with, such givenness. The Warsaw photographs catapult us into a different mode of Rousse’s poiein, projecting onto the real, geometric volumes at once illusory, perfect trompel’oeil creations, and yet ‘volumes’ – rectangles, triangles, squares of brilliant colour – staring back at us from the glossy surfaces of the photograph’s own magical, yet in a sense, no less real thereness – with what Piguet terms ‘the brilliance of something evident’. Subtle or luminously stark effects are thus produced with a corresponding variance of aesthetic, emotional and, most broadly for Rousse, spiritual values, as meticulously calculated ‘perspectival’ painting and architectural transformation combine to cast into ambient space the illusion of autonomous yet integrated forms and volumes we can appreciate as ‘impossible’, just as, at the same time, we can puzzle over their creation – having, I stress, at our disposal only the photographic trace, the treated, nomadically occupied given space having since returned to its crumbling anonymity or its complete destruction. The 1992 Bratislava work focuses upon the conjunction of language and presence, place and its potential sacredness, the temple-like nature of a large single letter and bare urban construct, the metaphysics of artistic, poeticpoietic inhabitation and the simplicity of deserted cell-like interior space. All of this working through the Reverdyan logic and experience of self-world-art-word relationship, their potential, but fleeting ‘consubstantiation’ – as Reverdy liked to put it, speaking of his own gesture, or Braque’s, Gargallo’s, Matisse’s, Léger’s.3 Georges Rousse

2

See Selected Bibliography. Consult also the artist’s excellent personal website: www.georgesrousse.com. 3 See Reverdy’s Note éternelle du présent (Flammarion, 1973) and Nord-Sud, SelfDefence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (Flammarion, 1975).

The Light of Death, a Sacredness of Doing: Georges Rousse

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tells us he discovered space and emptiness via his walks in the country. His urban art, however – and again I appeal to Reverdy – facing itself with the depletion and quasi-nullness of the abandoned, seeks to ‘fill the void’ of emptied beingness with the poiein, the doing, of art’s own, new and temporarily renewing ontic investment. Endlessly, from place to place, in an unfinishable gesture of ontic achievement. Miyota (1999), whilst predicated upon a globally similar poetics, further develops new means and strategies, most notably those involved in his conceptualisation and practice of the ring or circle architecturally and perspectivally generative of a tunnel effect, wonderfully centred here upon the desire to telescope and merge inside space and outside space. Whilst the latter retains its pristine givenness (: a white bridge-cumplatform, water and reflected light, evergreens and bare though delicately hued deciduous branches, sky, varyingly lit), the inside space bears the many faces of Rousse’s exquisitely structured formal and chromatic harmonies that leave us in awe of his shifting vision and the patient labour required for the latter’s realisation via the residual photographic traces finally offered in their utmost discretion, their sereneness, their remarkable capacity to plunge us into, now a vaguely monastic atmospherics, now some hypermodernity of hardly imaginable space. Let us look more closely at certain aspects of the logic of place and space in Georges Rousse’s artistic practice – this, before proceeding to a consideration of the role of light and the poetics of photography, of Rousse’s characteristic processes and protocols, of questions of perception, image and presence, of the complexities of purpose and motivation, of, finally, the nature of that ‘spirituality I should like to confer upon abandoned places without there being any link with a particular religion’. I shall be compact in detailing factors pertinent to the conception and experience of place: 1: Rousse selects the places that will become his temporary studios for works assuming their name, now Nice (1984), now San Diego (1999), now Bretigny (1994): this is not as unusual as it may seem initially: painters as different as Michelangelo or Daniel Buren, sculptors such as Bernard Pagès, installation artists like Annette Messager or Sophie Calle, all can shift nomadically their centre of creative production according to desire and opportunity;

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2: within such chosen place, Rousse then further selects specific spaces that coincide with some pure visceral impulse or else some geometric-aesthetic vision of their plastic transmutation and resultant photographic trace; 3: the ‘space mythomaniac’ that Rousse deems himself, smilingly, to be, tends quasi-exclusively to opt for derelict, grotesque, ruined place, place that has maximal potential for transformation via plastic intervention: an-xiety, danger, any funerary atmosphere associated with such dubious place is offset by the sense of creative freedom available, by a solitude affording deep reflection upon the relation of self – body and mind – to world and human gesture, past and immediate;4 4: the ‘void’ of space that once was living, inhabited, dynamic, is thus thrust up against the initial ‘void’ of doing’s, poiein’s desire: being-in-space/place thus urges a confrontation with meaning and purpose, those of others, then those of self, now; 5: place, in consequence of this, is lived by Rousse at once as a container of pure matter returning to its intrinsicalness, and as a space ever inviting human relation to it, action in and with it, cocreation, let us say; 6: to immerse the self in place implies a connection with the genius loci of, say, the Abbaye de Fontevraud (1985) or Israël, Mer morte: but whilst this is certainly so – he can tell us that ‘my memory is still engaged with all these places’ – Georges Rousse’s art per se does not constitute a flagrant archaeological or cultural exploration of place: the vestigial ‘offeredness’ of the latter always is visible or easily sensed or, as in Miyota, inner space opens upon a vast but just glimpsed outer environment, but Rousse’s plastic gesture takes us far beyond raw givenness that, yet, place-name and date honour, 4

Whilst, therefore, death, funerialness, are ever in our minds, so, equally, are notions ever in excess of that obsession with death and morbidity that has characterised much art, both ancient and modern.


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and moves us towards, at most, a fundamentally, magically renewed sense of any genius loci: the sight of raw site becomes the vision of ‘cooked’ art, if I may invoke the spirit of Lévi-Strauss; 7: ‘space as support’, George Rousse argues, a support for that doing-in-the-instant that so appeals to him, whether it be architectural construction that ‘allows for movement in space’ or the sheer ‘confrontation’ of body with space, painting’s ‘projection’ of body into space – sacred human energy ever stirring the dust of place’s collapse; 8: the space of Rousse’s photographic representations, like Mallarmé’s sense of poietic space: neither real, nor virtual, but a space where A + B has become C, a ‘third element, fusible and bright’:5 Entrepôt Vichy achieves this transcendence by means of an astonishing liberation of the existing into an otherness that is intensely diversified in its ‘dream’ without ever leaping beyond what Mallarmé termed the ‘words of the tribe’:6 tools of expression belonging to all and the everyday; Martinique (1990) takes, too, such tools, this time more truly Mallarmé’s, those of written language, and, in combination with photographic ‘magic realism’, if I may appropriate this designation, leaves us with neither the given nor some total transmutation, but a hybrid as autonomous as it is straining both ‘back’ to the given and ‘forward’ to some ultimate absolute of the poetic; 9: if Rousse may regard his work as resulting in the generation of ‘spatial fiction’ – and one can readily understand such a designation despite the tension between residual ‘primary’ realness and the ‘unrealness’ to which certain works specifically draw our attention7 – we should not imagine that such fictionality is a place of pure spectacle: the question is a complicated one, with which Rousse tussles, but which remains inevitably open (and to which we shall return). Let it be said 5

Cf, Mallarmé’s ‘Crise de vers’, in Divagations. See, for example, Malllarmé’s ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’. 7 Though such ‘unrealness’ is, of course, the manifest réalité seconde of art. 6

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here, provisionally, that the installation work for Paris – Rue de Lappe (1998), vast, complex, as time-consuming as any theatrical choreography, is undertaken not purely to produce an enticing, entertaining exhibition of its ingeniousness or even its enchantment: Rousse’s motivations, as I shall seek finally to argue, run deeper and ever search, as Bonnefoy might write, beyond the sign, beyond the yet glorious shimmer of image. The artistic work that Georges Rousse gives us, let us emphasise, remains yet the photographic trace, the thin signature of a particular man’s attention and creation left on a sensitised paper surface produced by the action of light at a particular time, in a particular place. The logic of photography is at once simple and extraordinary, complex and ever individualised. The photograph is the drawing, the grapheme, of light itself, of that which light impacts, ‘lights upon’, reveals, the grapheme too of the eye behind the camera lens, ever selecting, adjusting, determining. As such it leaps, despite any protests, beyond the seeming banalisation to which, some argue, popular digital usage subjects it: it is the locus of an infinity, in fact, both of observed and observer, their junction, their separation, their becoming and their relativity, their ephemeral absoluteness, their fleeting definitiveness. To deem Georges Rousse a ‘voyeur’ – as well as a ‘graffitist’ –, whilst having some real pertinence (one might think again of the Entrepôt Vichy work or works of pure photographed inscription, and all gazing through a tiny lens may be felt to betray a voyeuristic, even erotic inclination somewhat diffused though still there in all eying of the other) –, to characterise Rousse thusly risks masking other dimensions of (Rousse’s) photographic gesture. Certainly, as Davvetas writes, the final image does not allow a total exegesis of Rousse’s poiein, his doing. Rousse himself tells us that the camera, initially, was ‘secondary’: painting and drawing maintained primary significance; and, even later, photography he holds to be a ‘tool’, i.e. not an end. And, if only a tool, photography could lead to what end? One, presumably, in consequence, beyond art’s trace? Régis Durand writes that Rousse’s work does ‘not involve and deploy photography as a medium, but [as] the theoretical and critical principle that it manifests, [...] bringing to the fore such notions as indexicality, trace, reproducibility and archive’ and he goes on to suggest that there are ‘three zones whose coexis-


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tence determines the perceptual and critical field of his photograph: circle, frame, and field’. But whilst such observations can be readily and increasingly appreciated in Rousse’s work, especially after the early photographic records of figurative painting in place – circle: the Le Mans work, or that of Lyon or Miyota, all 1999, for example; frame: Metz (1994) or Vienne (1995); field (a fuzzier notion): Clichy (1999) or Argentan, Maison de Fernard Léger –, in effect, such ‘zones’ overlap and intertwine their logic: surely all of Rousse’s photography remains a material medium, a concretely explored way and avenue, offering access to, and an archiving of, modes of being and relating, dreaming and ‘seeing’, that exceed the pertinence of the notions Durand yet observantly brings to our attention. If Rousse seeks to push photography to its limits, it is because from the outset his deep and ever emerging half-sensed mission, whilst choosing the photograph as his ideal avenue of doing, sees and feels and senses, beyond the product of photography, something deeper and greater, thus giving us an oeuvre only photographic in appearance. One could, of course, argue similarly, and despite the vast surface distinctions to be made, in the case of a Faucon or a Cordehard, a Denis Roche or the Canadian Ernest Cadegan. At the heart of the logic of the photographic act, then, Rousse lives, is fully conscious of – and this, despite, perhaps in part because of, the intense fullness of physical experience and action on the site of photography’s doing –, a voidedness, an emptiness in the very bosom of seeming accomplishment, a desire returning, a desire for being and having, where the grapheme of light finally supplies, definitively, neither. Light, in principle, offers revelation, of thereness, of what is, of presence. And yet the grapheme of light’s action upon the world, remains merely the latter’s image, it offers appearance, illusion of being, intangibleness, absence. On the one hand, dreamed coincidence of self and world via image; on the other, Rousse’s sense, our sense, no doubt, too, of what he often terms – within the very space of his photograph (Montbéliard [1995], for example) – ‘unrealness’, yet an unrealness somehow emanated from what is universally termed the ‘real’. Rousse has spoken, merging notions of presence and metaphor, of his ‘search for light in sordid places’: his doing in the latter is predicated, he adds, on ‘welcoming it’, ‘making it the obsessive subject’ of his doing: simultaneously, no doubt indistinguishably in a sense,

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seeking out physical light is a seeking out of symbolic, transfigurative light – ontic light, I should call it, the light of being available at the centre of all that is – but in its deep tension of what language fragments and categorises as realness and unrealness. In his correspondence with Jocelyne Lupien, Rousse speaks of ‘finding a way out through art. With only the light of art, but also that [light] seemingly produced by inner energy’. Photographic images such as those of varyingly luminous white volumes hanging in black or half-lit space – in the Tokyo work (1998) or Kanazawa (1998), say, or, again, the various Embrasure or Gallarate (1987) works – all allow us to appreciate Rousse’s fusion of light as a physical, sensory phenomenon and experience – experience both prior to, and within, via, the created product: the photo-graph – and light understood to be a metaphor for the revelatory power of psychical energy, consciousness in all of its unspeakable vastness and depth in relation to self’s doing and its ‘objects’. All of this means that Rousse, in material, ‘real’ terms, will seek out places of light’s possible passage, windows, doors, skylights, will cut and pierce to further access, vary, amplify or nuance physical light, will use artificial lighting or phosphorescent paint to similar ends. And, simultaneously, coextensively, both the energy of the produced ‘unrealness’, the virtuality that is the now inseparableness of imageas-absence and image-as-presence, and the energy, psychical, mental, spiritual, we may term it, at the heart of the self’s contemplation and doing – such energies bear the only name Rousse feels able to attribute to them: light. Light: photos, perfect figure for the fullness/emptiness, the presence/absence of ontos, of being – and its logos. Let us, at this point, gather into some further coherence our appreciation of Georges Rousse’s modes and processes, both in strictly physical terms and conceptually. Material protocols mutate from painting chosen available architecture, walls, floors, ceilings, etc., as with Entrepôt Vichy, but continuously right through to very recent works such as Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle (2000) or Étioles (2000), into that direct intervention in and on such architectural space which will entail cutting, dismantling, breaching, all forms of deconstruction of the existent in order to construct the envisioned, the conceptualised. Catherine Strasser argues that Rousse is not a ‘progressive rebuilder’, and certainly what reconstructive ‘advance’ Rousse’s gesture entails


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aims at no permanency: it produces the fleeting trace of some quasiideality or dream offered to a space destined to disappear, Roussian reconstruction and all. Rousse’s preparatory work involves sketches, variants, Polaroid shots. Endless adjustment and readjustment is required, using transparencies to ‘guide’ the camera, going back and forth between camera and space-to-be-modified-and-photographed, all in order perfectly to ‘project’ imagined form onto ‘framed’ space. The grids and rings that proliferate in Rousse’s work, whether they involve chalking, painting, construction or reconstruction, all pass through such immaculate processes of adjustment, alignment and verification. Witness, by way of example, the exquisite geometry and optical mathematics at play in works such as Le Mans (1999) or Varsovie (2003) or Vitry (2007), where characteristically, moreover, the gaze is invited to view different transfigurative options thinkable for/in the same space. Colour, of course, is at the intimate heart of Rousse’s vision, as is his lettering, his ‘poetry’ of letters and individual words or his cartographic forms. None are processual modes, however, they remains variations of painting, drawing, volumising, elements not of photography per se, but of what photography can capture within the infinity of its cast net. This ‘net’, however, is synonymous with what Michel Dieuzaide regards as the magic of Rousse’s focal point – which rests on the material assembly I have described and which Rousse’s work always allows us to sense, if not absolutely to rationally dissect, as viewer of his photographs. To move towards a more abstract understanding of what such basic physical modes of artistic production represent is at once, as with all such endeavours, risky, uncertain, infinitely arguable; and yet delightfully so, because fascinating, humanly intriguing, natural: ultimately, all language is conceptual, structural, as abstracted from and connected to the ‘real’ as Rousse’s oeuvre itself. And so, I offer the following compact observations towards an intitial conceptualisation of the modes and protocols we see at play here: 1: Rousse’s work is multiply interventional, it acts upon the given world, and it ‘comes between’ world and self, joining and yet stressing difference, deferring and blurring the forms of such difference;

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2: Rousse’s gesture is transformative, predicated on metamorphosis, at the same time as it is retentive of givenness; 3: such replasticisation as is constantly involved mirrors the ever moving plasticity both of the world and our thinking, our consciousness, of the work; 4: such ongoing (re)thinking of what is, emphasises the degree to which creation is never static, both within the oeuvre as a whole and within a given photograph – where thought endlessly pursues the physical and symbolic thread of the work’s infinity; 5: if a logic of trompe-l’oeil and illusion are elements at issue in Rousse’s work, they are not gratuitous: the ‘play’, the ‘inter-play’ they generate does not seek some flashy theatricisation, some deceptive spectacle or pure divertissement: rather does it lay before us the question of the real, its inherent plasticity I have just evoked and which implies a givenness that is mobile, available to surprise (its surprise for us, and our surprising of it), poetic – that is, poietic, plunged into the heart of an endless, ever renewable poiein, doing or creatableness; 6: Rousse’s work thus finds in itself, thinks itself into, an ongoing condition of virtualisation: it is a living, working philosophy of the architectural, the spatial, the place/non-place of their potentiality, their potentiation; 7: hence, from a founding logic of the morbid, the moribund, there emerges, ceasely refigured, replasticised, a logic, a poietics, if I may put it that way, of birth, rebirth: Demosthenes Davvetas has finely detailed this conceptual maieutic process which involves Rousse’s ongoing delivery – with, let it be added, its concomitant notion of liberation, deliverance: a birthing of new realness, a secondary realness, that of art’s new consciousness of feasible realness, out of the matrix, the womb, of the given; 8: this conceptual movement – for it is essentially a movement of mind – may be said to operate a double sublimation: not


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merely an elevation, a ‘raising high into the air’, of art over the givenness of the real, i.e. a transcendence that would imply art’s aesthetic superiority: certainly, such a conceptualisation of art’s gesture is ever available to viewer and artist; but, further, in Rousse’s work – as in Baudelaire’s – , the ‘sordid’, the ‘derelict’, the ‘grotesque’ (with all of their metaphoric applications), because they remain either visible or clearly implicit within the final photographic residue, may be understood, conceptualised, felt even, as fundamental to sublimity: what we normally conceive of as a division between upper and lower, transcendent and immanent, dissolves: all becomes sublimis, magnificent, ‘divine’. Reflexions such as these, inevitably are equally relatable to broader questions of perception and image, truth and fiction which can at times preoccupy Rousse or certain of those critics meditating his work. Let us take a closer look at a number of works before proceeding to some further global observations pertaining to these questions – which, whilst pertinent to all assessment of art, come into especial focus in the context of Rousse’s strongly self-aware, even arguably selfreflexive, gesture. The Bercy (1985) photograph we can see on Rousse’s own website – from which I shall, on this occasion, draw all examples – offers a ‘virtual architecture’ in the form of a large, ‘solid’ but luminously transparent cross imposed on empty warehouse space. We perceive this as a physical impossibility virtually materialised; it illuminates the very spaces of the warehouse it covers/uncovers. We understand it to be a superbly engineered illusion, yet we perceive it as a photographic reality, perhaps not grasping Rousse’s ingenious technique. The Rome (1986) piece, classified – Rousse’s groupings overlap and are not technically determined in any firm way – as a creation ‘through the mirror’, is perceptually challenging and enchanting in that, via the fusion of a blue geometric square imposed onto interior space and the image of trees somehow mirrored and projected with their sky onto this same interior space, the eye and the mind struggle to stabilise rationally the spatiality and the underpinning reality at the heart of the perceived. The image Rousse gives us in his Les Mesnuls (2005) photograph (similarly grouped) is equally superb in its magical inventiveness, but it does not leave us as dizzy as the Rome (1988) image just discussed: we are relatively sure as to where we are: a bath-

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room focussing attention on the console with its washbasin, the facing window giving out onto a long view across some garden to distant trees, the side window a little less reassuring as to spatial organisation, the whole slightly warped by wide lens effect. What delights and surprises, however, is the mirror attached to the window still facing the washbasin, and, more specifically, the space it reflects: a brilliantly painted and multihued interior space suspended in all its incongruity by virtue of its framed mirroredness in the midst of the plain and naturally given bathroom space. It is a wonderful image, Dali-like, surreal, yet equally comprehensible in its magic and without the flurry of psychical implications which surreal meldings of A + B generate. The Berlin (2003) photograph shows a stylish desk with chair and lamp, in clean surroundings, with a ‘painting’ – Rousse’s classification is tableaux: pictures, painted images, tableaus or artistic arrangements – on the back wall, but a large one, reaching to the floor. If, again, we are not plunged into the swirl of the unconscious or phantasm, we do realize that this picture-on-the-wall (with its own swirling scrawl of yellow, red and blue lines on similarly hued pallid ‘backcloth’) carries within it/behind it a hidden, secret reality – or is it illusion?: steps, walls, corridor, some entrance or other space. And, we wonder, just how staged is the entire ‘scene’ the image depicts, how true, how fictional – this on the part of an artist wary of theatricisation, he has told us, of spectacle. Three other examples will suffice in this preliminary exploration, and let us firstly take the Vitry (2007), featured by Georges Rousse in the category of ‘place’, and then the Clichy (1999) photograph as well as the Grands Moulins (2005) piece, both grouped under the heading of ‘elements’. The Vitry photographs – Rousse gives us three on his website – show what appear to be var-ious pseudo-wrappings of a building adjacent to a main road, different modes, in effect, of a same reality, so that we are brought, as ever, to question the capacity of the eye to actually see the ‘truth’ of the real, caught as we are in the game of a toying perceptual manipulation – with no intent to deceive, however, or even mystify, puzzled as we may remain: we are left to deal with photographs and so we are not able to fully benefit from a sensing of our direct relation to place. The Clichy photograph goes further. Its ‘reality’ seems stunningly unenvisageable. How could, we ask, a whole other, essentially outside, world suddenly surge forth in the middle of this vast interior space? Is the image offering us a ‘penetration’ into the innards of the ambient space? Is the im-


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age somehow superimposed upon the latter? The ‘impossible’ seems to be made available.8 Rousse plays with time and space, reveals their imaginable realness, that utopian non-place Davettas speaks of. The image is a box of delights, of pseudo-Pongian ‘obplay’ and ‘objoy’ – for, make no mistake about it, pleasure is at stake in such a fabulous, affabulating trompe-l’oeil. The Grands Moulins photograph (still on Georges Rousse’s website at latest viewing) gives us a hoop of fire ‘miraculously’ hanging free in disused, raw industrial premises, light filtering through windows onto concrete columns and rubble. We are transported, ‘metaphorised’ (‘carried over’) into image, into a ‘symbolicalness’, a ‘thrown-togetherness’ of the preexisting and the dreamed, a place of epiphanic magicalness that other Grands Moulins works do not necessarily seek to achieve – for example, that photo which allows us to peer through a possibly prefabricated blue-painted wall, pierced and showing the vast abandoned space that the burning hoop no longer ‘illuminates’ à la Rimbaud. Endless questions may be said to arise from these works. They echo, moreover, through the entirety of Georges Rousse’s oeuvre, and, perhaps most importantly, they are not, unless we should opt for reductive thinking, amenable to flat resolution: the questions we may ask allow us to understand the fluidity, the openness, the sheer delicacy of the conceptualisableness of matters of perception and image, truth and fictionality, in art in general, and perhaps particularly that of what some deem to be a contemporary quadraturist.9 Take the question of perception. There is that of Rousse himself, his incipient gaze, absorbing and meditative, yet, knowing of his own root intention to intervene, quickly calculating, selecting particular space and angles, contemplating, conceiving architectural modification, perceiving both the realness, givenness, and, beyond the latter, attending to appearance

8

In effect, Rousse builds the structure in situ, then imposes, one must here assume, onto this complex but minimal structure, the photographic images of the spaces he wishes to represent via a final photographic capture of the assemblage in the chosen Clichy context. But, of course, all we see, on the website and at the exhibition, is the amazing final composite photographic image meticulously elaborated. 9 Quadratura is an art flourishing in the Baroque period and entails the use of perspectival illusion, trompe-l’oeil, and thus embraces architectural and sculptural logic via painting. One might view, by way of example, the work of Andrea Pozzo at the Sant’Ignazio in Rome.

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and a disappearance, an erasure concomitant with new appearance. Such portrayal as Rousse chooses to offer is thus merged with what may be thought of as a self-portrayal, a portraiture attentive to inner vision, yet stemming from a perceiving of the given as a site of great plasticity, an infinite feasibility, in correspondence yet with the inner eye – the imagination, the image-machine of selfness. From such perceptual equations we may move to those affecting the viewers we are of Rousse’s photographs. And, of course, we are immediately immersed in a plurality of seeing, moving not only from your perception of, say, what is at play in the Vitry (2007) photographs or the Les Mesnuls (2003) mirror-in-bathroom photograph, to mine, but also within your or my own perception of a given piece, what is seen and thought, perceived-conceived, may be understood, indeed, lived, as endlessly shifting, becoming, as ever renewable, rebirthable as Rousse’s own gesture. In this sense we might argue that, despite its apparent immobility, the photographic image is infinitely mobile, and, whilst this may be maintained of Boubat’s memorable Petite fille aux feuilles mortes, jardin du Luxembourg (946) or Atget’s images of shop windows or a woman smoking on a cobbled street or some of those early, ‘primitive’ photographs such as Edouard-Denis Baldus’ 1854 Moulin en Auvergne or Henri le Secq’s 1856 Vase de fleurs, fantaisie photographique, Rousse’s constructions invite us to penetrate still further and deeper into the luminous forests of their graphemes. We may be tempted to simplify the debate by maintaining that the image viewed is, in its seeming distancing of itself from givenness, from Bonnefoy’s présence, and its generation of art itself, merely artfulness, artificiality, artifice, etc.; by maintaining therefore that such an image is the act and place of sheer play, a pure fiction d’espace or spatial fictionality, as Rousse himself can call it, and, as such, is mere surface, superficial ‘unspace’ as Gérard Titus-Carmel has termed art’s and writing’s ‘non-place’ of being and doing. But we cannot so easily slip out of the question: once posed, it remains a site of arguableness.10 And, of course, we would be dismissing deep issues such as the sheer strangeness, the magic realness of images and perception, not just the conceivable beauty of form, but the more profound relation10

In effect, ‘unspace’ yet remains – but, then, it is the place of one’s poiein, one’s making, remaking, of the world, and it involves the entirety of one’s bodily and mental being – the act and place of what Titus-Carmel terms his ‘presence to the world’.


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ship between forme and fond, all surface appearance and all conceivable meaning at its heart – all matters, by way of example, pertinent in effect to Rousse’s doing, but, too, to ours. So we may then return to the Bercy (1985) photograph discussed above or the vertig-inous one of Rome (1988), and we may ask whether there is any truth in the images they provide. Can they be reasonably held to be ‘lies’ in that, as Davvetas has written, they ‘negate’ – arguably, only, of course – the topos (warehouse, given place) to create an ou-topos, a utopian (image of) place? If so, is all dreaming, imagining, theorising, ‘lie’? Rousse’s work – it is possible that it is one of its principle beauties – plunges us incessantly into a weighing of such fundamental seeming paradoxes: seeming, of course, because only language imposes such divides as truth and falsehood, reality and fiction. What a work such as Clichy (1999), or again, the Grands Moulins (2005) piece mentioned above thrusts before us, is the truth of fiction, the representationalness of the invented, the ‘presence’ of the image, the sheer, infinite depth of all createdness, whether given or humanly, artificially continued. And, if we find this hard to swallow, then we can at least acknowledge that Georges Rousse’s démarche raises the question of all of the above. And that this is no small thing. And that he does so, silently, leaving us to our own perceiving and conceiving, which is one of the signs of great art: its immersion in its own teeming creation and not some insistent ideology. Jocelyne Lupien suggests that every image – of light, let us remember – Rousse gives us – let us say, the 1984 Sydney‘s floating human figure in its crystal cocoon of blue light, or the 2003 virtual ‘geometric forms’ of Elstal, suspended in mid-air in a great bare room – ‘has the power to “envelop” and “contain” us and to provide us context (a place) for our [own] psychic investments’. And, not dissimilarly, Alain Sayag asserts that this is an art that ‘[brings] us finally just to ourselves, our solitude, our anxiety’ – but, I should add, our wonderment as we too stand, with Rousse, at the crossroads of all thinking about objectivity and subjectivity, givenness and creation, other and self. I should like to hone in a little more precisely, having reached the point at which we find ourselves, on questions of purpose, motivation and desire in Rousse’s art, and I shall thus proceed to offer fourteen forcibly compact remarks in this connection, largely contextualised in reference to a freely chosen work:

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1: Monique Sary has spoken of Rousse’s work as one ‘destined to calm present times’ and, in that, its power might be said to coincide with that of Poussin’s Saisons of which Bonnefoy has recently spoken in The Radiant Space11or that at the heart of, say, Cézanne’s Horloge noire or Braque’s Bougeoir, for certainly Rousse’s gesture, meditative, aspires to that serenity capable of oozing from even the most disturbing givens of the real. Works such as those of the 1987 Latina (with its rich red-painted walls and naturally flooding light), or the long narrow ascending stairwells, pure white or pitch-black, of the 2006 Madrid photographs, leave us in no doubt as to the role of quietude in Rousse’s aesthetics-cum-ontology. 2: such placidness does not disallow an awakening of the unconscious via the broad démarche Rousse’s art employs, this in some measure due to the artist’s largely solitary entry into empty and not uncommonly sordid space: a confrontation with the self’s more ‘remote’ and even repressed psychic zones, and possibly, a half-conscious desire to explore such a confrontation in a universe of stunning contrastive materiality and mentation. To witness works such as the 1983 Bordeaux, CAPC, with its crouching figure with ‘aura’ and adjacent star in their raw environs, or any of the numerous circle-ringtunnel photographs such as the 1997 Barcelone series, is to join the movement of mind down its endless strange corridors. 3: Georges Rousse has spoken of his desire to share his enthusiasm and his hope: his is not an art of narcissistic satisfaction: it is predicated on a vision beyond the degraded, an ardour and eagerness in the midst of a world that might oppress, a zest seeking to act contagiously and uplift. This seems clear from the outset as we contemplate the invigorating energy of form and colour in the Entrepôt Vichy work, that of the same period – Villeurbanne (1982) or Serquigny (1982) –, or, say, the serene fervour of his word-works, if I may call them that: the lovely unassuming but uplifting transformations of the

11

The title, proposed to me by Bonnefoy, of the translation of his Le Grand Espace (Galilée, 2007). See the Selected Bibliography.


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1991 and 1992 Paris creations or, again, the PontaultCombault (1992) works where the potency and purpose of EROS and GAIA reign. 4: hope and fervency are, in effect, quite avowedly generated and, via their sharedness, somehow potentiated with a view to exorcise the demons, real or possible, of death, decay and darkness. Thus does ‘the light of art’ – viewed materially: the photo-graph, and symbolically, as we have seen – ‘fight’ the other dimensions we may feel threaten to swamp existence. Endless are the works where this is manifest in Rousse, but I draw attention to a fine photograph which is part of the Kobe (1995), where we see a basic empty shed or garage-like space, its floor shattered, the bowels of the earth beginning to gape open, but the entire drear and barren space transformed by Rousse’s blue, near Yves Klein blue, painting, the whole illuminated not in some conspicuous fashion, but through a thin vertical sliver of space allowing the light of the world, of being itself, to cast its minimal but sure and transformative radiance across the inner space. 5: a further powerful motivation behind Rousse’s work centres on his desire and delight to act or do, make, in the instant: spontaneously, impulsively, in a gesture of multiple freeing: of self and other of any lingering demons, of place from its subsidence of energy and potentiality, of art’s poiein from its conceivably constraining aesthetic agendas, and so on. The Kobe work just described clearly emerges via such a logic of instantaneous determination, and even though weighing and meditation, as well as ultimate care and scrupulous execution, are involved in the creation of works such as the 2000 Paris, Belleville, still it remains that Rousse privileges the significance of the experience of extemporaneous, unprepared conceptualisation and doing in situ.12

12

See the article by Dominique Roussel.

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6: such method or anti-method does not, very far from it, prevent that drive to think, question and imagine Rousse clearly believes is equally central to all he accomplishes: in effect, doing-in-the-instant is synonymous with thinking. The actions are one, quite unparadoxically for him. To create the images the Le Mans (1999) work or the Argentan, Maison de Fernand Léger work give us, demands, for Georges Rousse, a seamless integration of imaginative immediacy and material intervention, whether the latter involves cutting, painting, construction, materialisation or dematerialisation as he can call it. Rousse is not an architect of prefabrication, but a doer, a poet, of the magical moment of an ever-feasibleness. 7: as such, one of the many purposes of Rousse’s work is to freely explore the media at his disposal, to discover what the sheer materiality of space is composed of – and may be, via his own spontaneously unfolding desire in situ, composable of. The Argentan work thus thrusts the artist into the infinite material potentiality of place’s beingness, if I may express it that way. His art thus explores not just art’s modalities, but also those, endlessly imaginable, thinkable, of space’s/place’s intrinsic being. The Kobe (1995) white on black piece or a good number of the remarkable Oberhausen (1996) photographs reveal an artist of very great insight and a vision extending far and deep into the invisibility of space’s offeredness. 8: such purposing works to reveal, to show, to bring before the eye and to the mind the infinite equations of a making, a doing, a poiein that demonstrate the ever possible resolution of what may seem like aporias, simultaneously physical and mental, psychological: thus does neglect become caring, sulliedness elegance, darkness light, solitude accompaniment, fear joy, and so on. Such instinctively desired restoration of the exalting is not so much a paradox, nor, despite seeming illusion, is it mere shimmer: rather is it shown to be made, ever makeable, thinkable, realisable. 1984 works such as La Jolla or the Sydney we have evoked above or Orleans seek to show that, if there is paradox in Rousse’s work, it is rooted in its determined and improbable accomplishment


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9: in this context we should emphasise the pertinence of Georges Rousse’s involving of young people in certain of his creative projects. Art may have its ‘higher’ ontology, its logic of interplay, relationship and transmutation of the earth’s givenness, but at the socio-politico-economic level, and at the latter’s heart which is psychological, emotional, spiritual, art can once more show that imagining, making, remaking are synonymous with self-transformation. His work with Le Centre d’Enseignement Professionnel et d’Accueil des Jeunes (CEPAJ) in and around Lyon roots itself in a firm belief that ‘art can be a true opening’ for those somehow otherwise marginalised. Philippe Piguet has spoken eloquently and rightly of the meaning of Rousse’s felt motivation in this regard. Surely, beneath its crust of magical harmony, it is, too, an art engagé. 10: from Shakespeare to Heidegger, from Reverdy to Neruda, much has been said of poetry’s gesture of inhabitation of the world. Rousse’s work, given its investment of place, self’s reappropriation of earth’s abandonedness, clearly establishes affinity with such a tradition of thought, and the artist himself has termed demeures – dwellings, ‘receptacles for other signs’ as Régis Durand has characterised them – his radically transformed de- and re-constructed, remodelled sites (resulting in his graphemes of light) – with all their aesthetic, ecological and spiritual connotations. The photographs showing the installation work for the Paris - Rue de Lappe (1998) work reveal the full complexity of ‘dwelling’ within the uninhabitable. Ultimately, I should maintain, the demeures remain less physical than mental, notional: dwelling places for thought and the ‘light of art’, but they are founded – I shall return to this most significant factor of all – upon a deep Roussian sense of the sacredness of an engagement with being – in the visible world, and the invisible. 11: of course, beauty cannot be removed from the knot of motivations Rousse might proffer in response to Bonnefoy’s (self-)querying as to the purpose of writing or painting, of all art. But it should be understood in the fullness of its metaphoricity: the beauty, that is, not simply of formal arrangements

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and harmonies, but that beauty at the centre of the sheer lifeaffirming energy of doing, that involved in sharing meditation, revelation, that which offers spaces for inhabitation where non seemed available, etc. Rousse has spoken of the question of ‘photogenics’ with Jocelyne Lupien, and, just as selection of space and development thereof hinges on impulse, spontaneous knowing and following of a line of, let us call it aesthetic, purpose, so too does this aesthetics meld instantaneously with an ethics, an ontology of beauty: the photograph and its underpinning work rely on this large fusion of the metaphors of beauteousness, from sociopolitical engagement to a spirituality beyond religion’s constraints. A work such as Drewen (2003) certainly creates an extraordinary aesthetic effect with its beamed roof and framing, the light entering from tiny apertures aloft, from a doorway and central ‘window’, the ‘lacework’ of the black crossbeams of the latter, and so on; but all such beauty, given, framed, constructed, chosen, finds itself powerfully supported by purposes far beyond, though manifested through, material aesthetics. 12: it has been suggested that transgression underpins Rousse’s gesture. If this is so – it is not a term he uses himself – it should be understood via its basic etymology: a stepping or going beyond. There is no desire for violent contravention of art’s long history in Georges Rousse’s gesture, but, as with all art, a making-beyond-but-with-givenness, a freeing, and a felt aspiration to explore a freeing of what is into its further infinity. No disobedience, but rather a spontaneous, visceral and mental obedience and consenting to the deep possibilities of doing and thinking our being-in-the-world. 13: Rousse is quite clear: all his work ultimately constitutes a search for ‘something beyond artistic practice as such’: it is a significant and plainly stated ambition. Art is not an end, but a channel, a conduit, a way. And each photograph casts its light upon this uncertain errancy and question. Safed (1990) gives us a dazzlingly lit room, with its end wall, with a vertical rectangle of blue-white luminescence or ‘window’ containing a human figure in this wall, and, to the right, a tiny red circle floating in space. It is a work in which one can feel the strain-


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ing of Rousse’s quest beyond the work’s specific constituent elements, metaphors all for the unnameableness at the end of its way. Or we may look at the 2000 Tshu Rolpa-Clermont Ferrand where Rousse’s photograph, showing a ‘virtual’ map floating free in a bare, windowless, factory-like space, invites us along paths of contemplation and inner journeying distinctly in excess of the signs of art. 14: Two conjoined purposes allow us at once to complete this assessment of motivation in Rousse’s démarche, and to lead us into the final observations I should like to offer. On the one hand, Rousse tells us of his profound sensitivity and aspiration to what he terms a ‘sacredness of space’. On the other hand, he can declare, in correspondence with the latter, that ‘my objective [is] not just to take a photograph, but to narrate a sacred action’. From the basis of an instinctive ambition to sacralise givenness, the astonishing fact of spatiality, an infinity at the heart of its seeming finitude, its offeredness as a site of doing, making, poiein – from such a base of desiring consciousness, Rousse proceeds to seek, enact and photographically ‘narrate’ a further sacralisation of his own doing in the endless sites of the earth’s, of being’s, spatiality. All of this is articulated beyond existing philosophical or intellectual equations, via a raw but sensitive and meditated sense of the artist’s being and doing in the given visible world, though such visibility, somehow, ever flits in and out of an invisibility synonymous with its mystery, buoying it all up, rendering image-ination ceaselessly possible within the world. With all ‘idea of religion [banished]’ from his work, Georges Rousse affirms, he is yet equally insistent upon what he terms a ‘spirituality’ which he is eager to both confirm and further ‘confer’ in his relation to place, and especially more needy abandoned and disinherited place. His approach to the latter and his action in it, his art, he deems ‘ascetic’: there may be jubilation and the expenditure of joyous energy, but Rousse’s art, its conception, its fabrication and its end product, is not baroque, showy, gaudily ornamental, seeking spectacularness. Though the photograph seems to offer but surface, Rousse’s gesture contemplates ontic depth, the sheer poiesis of things, forms, thought, the mystery of their being and their making. It is an art finally

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less cultural and less intellectual than it is spiritual and poetic. It does not privilege memory or nostalgia, despite any ‘archaeology’ we may see attached to it, any ‘confronting [of] palimpsest meaning of sites’, as Philippe Piguet has written. Alain Sayag has gone as far as to suggest, rather extravagantly to my mind (for ‘being’ remains a central concern), that Rousse produces work ‘outside of history, being and all memory’. None of this should be understood as implying the superiority of art over presence, some absoluteness of antinature: we have seen Rousse assert that his search exceeds the presumed limits of ‘artistic practice as such’. The ‘dematerialisations’ his work involves may be seen as gestures deep into the non-materialness of finitude, the epiphanic potential of the ephemeral, the strange light of the opaque. Such a spiritual exploration-cum-self-exploration, ‘proceeding independently of religion’, Rousse again stresses, thus perceives a sacredness in the midst of, in the very bosom of, the ‘profane’, but the ‘spirituality’ of which he speaks is less an idea than an experience, a feeling emanating from being-and-doing-in-place. The ontology that it implies thus lacks anything we may regard as ideological or purely theoretical. Perhaps, at best, an instinctive subjective knowing that the drawing-painting (graphein) of light (phos/photos) can somehow portray, whether in the work of the various Embrasures or Latina (1987) or Arles, all with their beautiful harmonies of red and white light, or the suffused luminescence of Safed (1990) or the needle of white light of Marseille (1986), or yet again, and most poignantly, the explosive green transcendence of Hiroshima (2001).

THE INTIMACY OF SILENCE: GENEVIÈVE ASSE The art of Geneviève Asse plunges its roots deep into her Breton childhood in and around Vannes, the ever shifting and shimmering sea of Brittany’s southern coast, the vast horizons hovering in the volatile sunlight and mist that bathe them, the crisp air and floating skies that speak of a sure but barely describable presence. The images of such early years, she tells Silvia Baron Supervielle, have not departed over the course of a long life spent largely in Paris, and, indeed, have been renewed and refreshed in their yet seemingly eternal power and delicacy via summer sojourns on the Île aux Moines, occasions filling the artist’s numerous as yet unpublished notebooks with the teeming traces of loved place. To look upon the paintings and engravings of Geneviève Asse, however, is to enter a world less of flagrant signs and certain location. This will increasingly be true as we move from the immediate givenness of, say, the very early Bouteilles (1942) appropriating and spatially and chromatically orchestrating simple everyday objects, caressed yet beyond perspectival concern, to a work such as the 1967 Fenêtre intérieure whose subtle and fused modulat-ion of blues, whites, purples leaves us suspended between the window opening upon outer air and atmosphere and the window that allows the gaze equally to bend back upon itself and the haze of an inner world of self-contemplation.1 The span of Asse’s plastic production is great, but it is coherent, fluidly imbricated from her first independent exhibition in 1954 at the Galerie Michel Warren in Paris to oils on canvas such as the large (200 x 200 cm) Ouverture de la nuit (1973) or the 2005 Écriture, the former with its light dusky blue resonance sliced open with a small horizontal cut of white (: a dawning?, a space of peering, revelation, pure, implicit illumination?), the second a tall stela (195 x 97 cm) of slate blue incised with barely perceptible white lines (miming written inscription but, in effect, inscribing the act and silently articulated reality of painting’s own poiein). Geneviève Asse

1

See Selected Bibliography. No personal website, but a good deal can be seen online: the Asse - Dossier pédagogique prepared by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes is particularly valuable.

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was a volunteer ambulance driver during World War II and helped to evacuate the survivors of the Terezin concentration camp: it was an experience profoundly impacting her consciousness, one that will shift her work from figurative specificities in the direction of an art of discretion, what many will deem abstraction, but an art, equally, of deep, private meditation and a rigorous exploration of the subtle mystery of being’s spatiality and chromatics. Charles Juliet will speak of an art of ‘high exigency’ and Rainer Michael Mason will argue that ‘few concessions [are made] to the habits of our gaze’ (RMM, 210). And yet nothing, as we shall see, can be said to be hermetic or esoteric in Geneviève Asse’s gesture: Ouverture de la nuit and Écriture, for example, may, as will all great and intense work, make demands upon self and the other, but there is no provocation, no radical desire for rupture, simply a slow contemplative evolution of the self’s relation to the world whose intrinsic logic is steeped in a ‘silence’ Asse’s art will serenely reflect. Not only does such an art, as Marie-Cécile Miessner suggests, ‘belong to our time’, but it dovetails, at once seamlessly and in original fashion, with much great art preceding it, thus providing, at the heart of its calm, ever becoming continuity, what Nathalie Gallissot rightly perceives as an intense experience of painting. In the pages that follow, I shall begin by addressing issues of abstraction and minimality, discuss important affinities with the work of other artists, detail Geneviève Asse’s plastic modes, manners and materials, turning then to questions of motivation, the meaning and pertinence of a very largely untheorised art, and ending with some tentative words of conclusion focussed upon three works not previously examined spanning a long and surprisingly diverse if subtly confederated major plastic achievement. Abstract is a term many critics have used to speak of work such as the above-mentioned Écriture, her 2003 Stèles assemblage, a polyptych gathering three 55 x 29 cm Asse blue ‘columns’ above two centred below, but also her 1955 Composition with its subtle melding of never pure whites, blues, yellow creams, and even more surprisingly, one might feel, her 1953 Route de Mantes, bare, unafraid before a reality seemingly dissolving though firmly evoked. Certainly, such work reveals a slow but sure detachment from any necessity to cling to some flat realist detailing. Certainly, there is a slow freeing of the eye and the mind from the object’s material flagrancy. Yet nothing

The Intimacy of Silence: Geneviève Asse

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here may be said to be abstruse, deliberately and mystifyingly recondite. Abstraction, yes, if by that term we follow Geneviève Asse’s own important affirmation that painting is ‘already an abstraction’: layers of paint, even careful mimetic intention, will never alter the ‘secondary’, removed character of art – its inevitable antinature, as, once again, Pierre Reverdy has it. When she tells us that those poets ‘dear to me are abstract’, Geneviève Asse is evoking their capacity to penetrate, meditatively, musingly, the very complexion of our immersion in and relation to the mystery of our being, the being of things. A work such as La Route de Mantes, or Bouteilles, or, again, her 1961 Objet dans l’espace – with its bluish-mauve trace plunged into and fused with ambient creamy-rose-blue and green-tinted space – such pieces hover between finitude and a sense of expansive spatial energy, an indefinable, frontierless presence. The real and its landscapes become a vast locus of light and shadow, far beyond yet connected with the experience of a Monet or a Seurat. Transparency, atmospheric shimmer, mobility of air, light, colour: this is not the abstraction of a Ben Nicholson or a Piet Mondrian or a Van Doesburg. A plastic, aesthetically alert, but lived and projected reflection on Asse’s rootedness in the silence of things: yes, by all means, but never experienced as pure, cold, abstracted geometrics, a mathematics cerebral, calculated, rationally ideal. Certainly, we may speak, with others, of a degree of austerity, somewhat ascetic, even ‘monastic’, it has been written, reflecting at once an early paucity of means, a making-do with the few objects at hand, but, too, Geneviève Asse’s natural, instinctive, happy capacity for squeezing wonderment from what today, for many, may seem like very little – a few bottles, a window – but, then, too, sunlight, sky, sea! One understands Jean-Luc Daval’s suggestion that, progressively, in Asse’s movement towards what he terms ‘the colour of light’ – its infinite subtleties yet largely dominated by blueness in her plastic universe – ‘the real [becomes] just an argument’; yet, I should maintain it never ceases to be a powerful ‘argument’, one going to the energetic, some would argue, the mystical, core of the being of things. Works like Sénanque or Chemin de lumière, both from 1971, remain remarkable paintings of light, its infinitely finespun, elusive, yet intimately experienceable availableness. Clearly, the titles anchor us loosely in what we may deem to be the sacredness of being-in-the-world, but

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this, for Asse, implies no doctrinalness, rather the sheer splendour of the mystery of our givenness. We may be, as are some viewers of Geneviève Asse’s art, tempted to dwell upon its bareness, a certain minimality that arguably shrouds it. It is yet essential, I should argue, to distinguish, on the one hand, minimal and frequently favoured means, from delicate and graceful, shimmering and vibrant effects; to distinguish equally, on the other hand, between the varying minimalisms of, say, Richard Serra’s 1985 Philibert et Marguerite, Dan Flavin’s 1987 Sans titre (à Maïakovski),1, or Piero Manzoni’s arte povera,2 and any painting or engraving Geneviève Asse offers us. Asse’s gesture is neither provocative nor raw; it does not resort to monolithic monumentality or modernity’s new technologies; it does not explore spectacular reiteration or geometric absolutism. Clearly, there is nothing nominal or perfunctory in a painting such as Chemin de lumière, nor does a work like Objet dans l’espace aim at reductiveness, tokenness, and far less superfluity. To enter Asse’s plastic universe is to come face to face with the ‘ordinary’ – things, shapes, colours, light, space – discreetly, unassumingly promoted to the rank of the wondrous, then to slowly be urged to contemplate the strange imbrications of form, the formed, and that which is beyond such confinement, offering things a larger, indefinable home, and a mode of being that exceeds the signs of rationalised visibility. Thereness, at-handedness, never leave this universe, nor the consciousness that lays it before us. It is just that ‘the road to Mantes’ can never be deemed a locus of platitudinousness, any more than the vibrant presence at the heart of early works such as L’Atelier (1948-9) or Boîtes bleues (1948) – or, again, those seldom offered human presences Geneviève Asse gives us in her most rare, but exquisite nudes: the 1953-4 Nu gris, tender, warmly, whitishly radiant in its blue-grey-green ambience, defying identification and contextualisation; the 1962 Nu, done in oil like almost all Asse`s painting, retreating further into pure lum-inosity, the trembling intimacy of presence`s ungraspableness; or the Nu allongé engravings, dry point and burin, done in 1968, a few quick lines, spontaneous, superbly

2

This, clearly, is not to suggest that these works lack depth, aesthetic, even ‘spiritual’ depth: Serra’s honouring of place and human presence, Flavin’s celebration of a great artist in terms radically his own, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, with its audacity, its humour, its visceral pertinence – all such work abounds in vitality, discreet and subdued as they may be thought to be.


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justes, to embrace with the utmost delicacy the beauty of feminine form. It will be clear at this point that, whilst Geneviève Asse`s art moves, fairly early on and firmly, away from the high and detailed specifics of the real, it by no means can be deemed divorced from the latter, utterly abstracted from all notion of representation. A painting such as Sénanque or the 1968 Porte blanche with its two shimmering creamy light panels, never quite symmetrical and framed by ever shiftingly coloured bands, or, again, the 1993 Paysage intérieur, an etching of pure meditative yet equally visual space (: blind, window, path, etc?) – all such works offer fullness without description, depiction never flatly mimetic or reproductive of the visible. Nuanced revelation replaces ‘narration’. This is as true of the 1954 Objets or La Balise of the same year (where the real is rendered in a gesture of discreet subjectivation and intimate appropriation), as it is of, say, the Nu gris we have spoken of and which offers no feminist discourse on the female body, no sharply outlined affective or socio-psychological argument such as we may find in a Louise Bourgeois or an Annette Messager. Intimacy, privacy, confidentiality dominate, meaning felt, intuited, never forcefully displayed. This is true even in Asse’s engravings, where we see pop up an occasional leaf or bird, ‘small sign[s], she tells Rainer Michael Mason, in the direction of nature’, without any fully rendered trappings, insisting that – and what more delightful refusal could one find of the label of a pur et dur (as a François Morellet might say) abstract art? – the ‘best school, for me, is the silence of nature’. At the heart of Asse`s figuration lie delicacy and grace, an at once chromatic and hyper-discreetly affective sensualness, indeed, in the broadest sense, a mode of spirituality drawing upon the given mystery and beauty of the form and formless depth of what Yves Bonnefoy calls the ‘presence [of] the things of the simple’. The large 1966 oil on canvas, Cercle paysage (200 X 250 cm) gives us, with its creams and yellows, its touch of green and its circular splash of red, a chromatic atmosphere we cannot help ourselves associating with sunrise, sky, mist and so on (this, despite the painting’s refusal of horizontality and thus the blatancy of mimesis). But the ‘landscape’ Asse places before us exceeds all fixed narrative signs, pulling us into both the sheer enigma of colour, and hence matter, and the latter’s infinite contemplatableness, its volatilisation into a mode of being we may

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deem non-material, intangible, ethereal. Many paintings by Geneviève Asse invite this experience of the real, and not just work such as the 1971 Transparence, which pushes further the modes explored in Sénanque (also 1971), or the 1992 Traversée bleue (180 x 180 cm), with its double horizon effect, its two white ‘foaming’, frayed bands on pale blue, but , too, its capacity for inducing dream, meditation, a blue ‘traversal’ of the veil of matter, an entry into the obscure yet luminous real of spirit. No, even more seemingly austere works such as the ensemble of the seven large Stèles (280 x 120 cm), painted over the 1992-99 period and recently exhibited together at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, or the 2003 Cercle II (diam. 120 cm), sober though they may seem, reveal endless subtle irregularities and ceaselessly invite us into a world not of quick semblance, but rather of reflection and those emotions at once aesthetic and quasi-sacramental. We might feel that we are just around the corner here from Mallarmé’s absente de tous bouquets, and perhaps, as for others even today, something of the aesthetico-ontological dream of the ‘azure’’s radiant and transparent ideality may linger in a work where light and space are meditated to a point of high and serene intensity. Oils such as the 1996 Infini, with its ever so softly incandescent powdery blue incised by a single vertical white line just faintly echoed elsewhere, or else the 2003 stela-like Verticalité, of a deeper-hued blue tonality, sliced down its full face (280 cm) by a thin near-black blue band with its frothy white trim and tiny traces of rose pink – such paintings concern themselves, however, not really with ideality or manifestly sought transcendence, but rather with the issue of the nature of space, and a corresponding desire to represent plastically, chromatically, its deep, unrepresentable alterity. There is, here, much inner vision, but, as Germain Viatte writes, it is ‘impregnated, as it were, with a belonging’, thus cancelling all opposition between abstraction and figuration, observation and that ‘seeing’ giving rise to Rimbaldian ‘illumination’. In a strange way, the line between a work such as the beautiful 2001 Sans titre (ligne rouge) and those drawings Geneviève Asse made and has kept but never exhibited of wartime hospitalised patients – such a line blurs over to reveal an unspeakable but sure continuity. Of the numerous artists to which Geneviève Asse has alluded in her various interviews, only a handful may be thought to have exercised something approaching an influence, and even then the latter


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may be said to be indirect, unconscious, beyond imitative intention. The natures mortes of Chardin which she can commonly evoke are held in high esteem for a certain ‘transparency’ that inhabits them, for their ‘construction’, for the fact that they constitute ‘painting outside of time’. This said – and it is clear that such perceived qualities find their echo in Asse’s aesthetics – works such as Chardin’s Les Attributs des arts or La Lavandière or La Raie, so finely commented on by Gérard Titus-Carmel, whilst exquisitely gathering and orchestrating their given elements, showing extreme sensitivity to light and translucency and succeeding in fusing the quotidian with a certain arguable atemporalness, yet leave us at some considerable remove from Asse’s L’Atelier or her 1966 Nature morte au paysage chinois, the first with its minimalities offset by the sensual elegance of its creams, browns and grey-blues, the second with its somewhat uncharacteristic venture into a lightly suggestive oriental manner that is not dissimilar from her Composition dans l’espace of the same year and whose title speaks better her intention in the former still life. The desire for independence remains ever strong; she has never belonged to any school or group. ‘I am, she maintains, and have always wanted to be as free as the air.’ A ‘marginal’, she can even tell Silvia Baron Supervielle, and this despite numerous occasions which, when working for Jean Bauret or for Bianchini-Ferrier of Lyon, would have allowed her to explore connections with artists as varied as Wols, Valentine Penrose, Kandinsky, Villon, Laurens, Sonia Delaunay or Dufy – all offering designs and commercial collaborations. As with Chardin, both Cézanne and Morandi are commonly evoked in connection with Geneviève Asse, who, herself, freely speaks of her alertness to their merits whilst denying any direct debt to either. Morandi, a ‘brother’, she realises, only meeting him in 1961, but, whilst appreciating his capacity for ‘painting beyond painting’ – for inducing a deep meditation of being beyond any aesthetic gesture –, she deems his work to have an atmospheric softness stemming from the experience of Italian light, which her own work does not possess. Mark Rothko, Ben Nicholson, James Turrell, Barnett Newman, Turner are some of the painters from the anglophone world Geneviève Asse can speak of in admiring terms and clearly understanding both delicate imbrications at work and distinct orientations that affirm significant departures. Rothko’s art, for example, ‘expresses a

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great innerness’, a quality certain to appeal to Asse ever penetrating the screen of form to gaze at its buoying substrata, but Rothko’s chromatics are not at all those of the more sober, discreet and classical creator of works such as Diptyque Atlantique (1993) with its two vertical ‘panels’, the one light blue, the other midday sky blue, separatedjoined by a black vertical line and framed right and left by vertical bands, whitish yet blue-tinged. The art of James Turrell, of course, appeals in an utterly different register: works like his 1967 Afrum 1 or the 1981 Night Passage project light and the illusion of its volume, and may involve cutting into existing architecture, but, whilst this is modally at an enormous remove from Asse’s manners and methods, the sheer power of contemplative stimulus it generates for an artist living the mystery of the real through her painting is unmistakable. Ben Nicholson is appreciated for his ‘rigour’, a quality never lacking in Geneviève Asse’s gesture: his 1939 Relief peint, in the MOMA, New York, provides a good example of abstraction’s capacity for subtlety and essential form, balance and harmony at once formal and chromatic. Barnett Newman, who can certainly offer paintings evocative of, though tonally different from, Geneviève Asse’s diptychs and triptychs – one could point to the 1948 Two Edges, or Onement III (1949) or The Voice (1950) – Newman, then, is felt to offer work that ‘reveals to our gaze in a single sweep’, but Asse distinguishes his conception of art, based on rupture, radical newness, from her own, steeped in art’s tradition – and, perhaps particularly and understandably, the French tradition. The balance and elegance of Braque, for example, are admired in his engraved as well as his painted work. Picasso’s endless inventive power and sheer technical skill, once again, as engraver and not only as painter, is brought home to her, whereas in Matisse there is a ‘simplicity’ and a ‘pure beauty’, clearly made to please Geneviève Asse, who is equally sensitive to Matisse’s ability to offer ‘painting at one with line-drawing’, a perfect imbrication of part and whole. Perhaps more surprising is Asse’s attention to the interiors of Bonnard, until we understand that what especially attracts her gaze are ‘the goldennesses of the air’, the artist’s alertness to the elusively modulated colourings of light. Monet’s fin-esse, too, is noted – perhaps Asse has in mind the Rouen cathedral paintings, the real ever evanescent, shimmering and shifting in time’s radiance? – and artists closer to her such as Nicolas de Staël and Raoul Ubac are in her ample mind, the former no doubt for that capacity for cancelling absolutes of


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abstraction and figurativity one can observe – Asse herself cites no particular pieces – in, say, his 1953 Agrigente or La Cathédrale, completed in the year of his death, 1955. As for Ubac, Asse is drawn to his engravings on slate that remind her both of the ancient inscriptions in the grotto on the Île de Gravinis and of the degree to which she deems all engraving to constitute an act of writing, a visceral inscribing of self upon the matter of the earth. The arguably ascetic, spartan quality of Geneviève Asse’s own extensive engraved work, work that yet attains to an elegantly and modernly understated and unembellished excellence, does not disallow her high appreciation of the engravings of a Mantegna (: perhaps his stunning Elephants?) or a Rembrandt (with his great and moving range of attention: Sleeping Puppy, Beggars receiving Alms at the Door of a House, Woman Reading, and so on) or even, closer to her own gesture, a Seurat. It is Goya, however, for whom she expresses her most fervent regard, whilst ever sensitive to the techniques and beauties of other great painter-engravers such as Seghers (: his Ottavio Picclomini is a tour de force, of course, though, as we have seen, portraiture had rarely drawn Asse herself). Undoubtedly, as we turn to questions of preferred manners, modes and materials, the dominance of the colour blue in Geneviève Asse’s painted oeuvre is foremost in our minds. She does not associate it with the work of her contemporary, Yves Klein, whom she deems more intellectually motivated, ever seeing herself as the instinctual, the spontaneously developing and acting quasi-autodidact. Nor does she herself root the blues of her art in precise manners, Greek, Islamic, for example, as Jean Leymarie has yet shown them to be. Charles Juliet see the ‘Asse blue’ as hovering ‘between night and day’ and it is true that it has by no means a stabilised chromatic quality, being constantly hybridised in the most subtle ways to provide it with vibration and energy. Nor is it simply a matter of modulating slate blue with cobalt and/or aquamarine, for it is a blue absorbing and emitting a full but superfinely deployed gamut of pinks, reds, creams, whites, principally, but often barely perceptibly. ‘Infinite divergence’, in short, as Germain Viatte suggests, at the heart of what others can see only as a pure azure chromatics. ‘Depth’ and ‘hope’ are the values Geneviève Asse herself tends to ascribe to the latter, in a sense piercing through matter to its otherness, perhaps in that in harmony with André du Bouchet’s observation: ‘blue // the name of the colourless’, or, revers-

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ing his equation, the colour of the unnameable. Whether we are looking at her 1987 Nu bleu, her 1990 Sans titre I or her 2001 Deux verticales rouges, Geneviève Asse’s blue draw us deep into its serene vortex, into worlds beyond paint and its nominations. The second most striking aspect of Geneviève Asse’s work, her painting, her engraving and even her design work, is her sensitivity to and exploration of space. Space, however, not as a solid, absolutely measurable entity, but open, fluid, expansive, never a space of entrapment. Space, but an art beyond dimensionality, a painting ‘between things’, Asse can maintain – things, such as boxes, doors, perhaps, or just lines, but also things not visible, in fact, largely not visible, beyond all framing the work may offer. The 1980 Sans titre I mentioned above, for example, gives us a kind of ‘overall’, but infinitely subtle within the space of its shimmering chromatics and, implicitly, in its invitation to dream its endless ‘without’, the ‘secret face’, as André Frénaud would say, of its givenness. Lines, horizontal, vertical, bands, diptychs, triptychs do not constitute a geometry of closed form in Asse’s work. They allude to material, physical appearance, but they point to only occasional markers in the midst of a vast, implicitly infinite and enigmatic spaciousness. Asse can enjoy the echoes and relationships of such spatial markers, the equilibria and harmonies they can orchestrate, but her geometrics ‘isn’t [really] one, something made from light perhaps’, she suggests. Even her natures mortes attract not just for the scrutiny of their spatialised contents, but for a ‘silence’ and a deep, residual ‘simplicity’ that exceeds, it would seem, insistence upon composition and spatial relationality. The ‘architecture’ of her painting is fundamentally ‘secret’, and, if Geneviève Asse desires it to be so, as she indeed does – line and its architectural quality should be inscribed in painting, be utterly at one with the latter – it is, I should argue, because her sense of space, despite her appreciation of formal harmonies, remains attuned to its ungraspableness, its rationally unrepresentable nature. Her 1969 Peinture, for example, resorts to its title to emphasise precisely this, just as her 1972 Chemin de lumière III, whilst evoking both semantically and plastically a logos of spatiality, yet plunges this logos into the transcendent enigma of light, or her 1971 Île, once again spatially suggestive via its title and beautifully concordant in its chromatic unfoldment, yet urges us to experience its space and all space as a phenomenon only symbolically ac-


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cessible. Structure may reveal itself in engraving through its reliance on firm spatialising line, but it should be remembered that Geneviève Asse’s engraved work is dominated by white space,3 a blankness that argues implicitly the precarious relativity of all structure, all those contents of space – of reality, of being, we might be prepared to say – that her painting will slowly but surely tend to erase to the advantage of an ontology and an aesthetics of unassuming ineffableness. Asse has spoken of the ‘breathing’ of the line in her work, no doubt thinking particularly of her painting: a breathing that is not a speaking, not a solid, firmly articulated argument about spatiality and its intrinsic orchestration, something infinitely softer, more vulnerable even, ‘giving meaning/orientation’, offering a ‘vibration, a kind of musical resonance’, she can muse, but in a language of poetic, intuitive silence. In 1997 the Musée de Vannes organised an exhibition featuring ‘the decorative arts in the work of Geneviève Asse’, an exhibition allowing for a much larger appreciation of the creative diversity of an artist known above all for her painting. Carpets, tapestries, stained glass, vases, collaborations with poets in the production and illustration of books offering their work: the range of involvement is significant, and it is an involvement that, with respect to the work with poets and stained glass design, has continued most recently and, as MarieFrançoise Le Saux has rightly argued, largely pursues, but in diverse manners, ‘a same exploration of space, transparency, colour’. Asse has claimed a fascination with the many materials she has worked with, silk carrés for Bianchini-Ferrier of Lyon, the endless range of paper used in the production of her prints, the use of particular colours in preparing designs made to modulate the light of stained glass in Albi (1976), in the Saint-Dié Cathedral in the 1980’s, for the Collégiale de Lamballe in the late 1990’s, where she collaborated with Oli-vier Debré. Her special blue, ever variegated, shifting in tone and complexity and, in that, as I have suggested, unlike KIein’s copyrighted blue, can find its place on a delicate Sèvres vase, on exquisite but more rugged carpets, her first Ouverture II, being made in 1967 for the Gobelins factory, her 1984 creation, Ligne bleue, for the Tapis de la Savonnerie de Lodève being equally memorable, as simple, as pure, 3

Charles Juliet likes that ‘friendly armature of black’ in the midst of the vast white space of the engraved work (in Mason: Geneviève Asse, 1998).

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as sure-footed in its conception as the majestically deployed single sweep of brilliant cobalt of her 1992 Rhuys for the Gobelins. However, lest we imagine that blue is an absolute, let me mention the charming, busy textile designs done earlier in Geneviève Asse’s car-eer, such as the Motif aux figures bleues, ocres et carreaux rouges or the lovely modern classicalness of her Motif aux lignes ocre-rose, delicate, elegantly and deceptively simple, or again, the striking Motif aux pichets et bustes sur fond noir with its blues and reds starkly silhouetted and, as ever, attention given to global orchestration of form and colour in a space, decorative, it is true, though never situatable. A very significant element of Geneviève Asse’s plastic gesture over the years has been her involvement with the book. Her first, though private venture in this regard goes back to 1947 when she painted and ink-sketched, as any of us might be tempted spontaneously to do, in the margins of a copy of Francis Ponge’s Carnet du bois de pins, but she tells us too that her many later collaborations with poets are intimately connected with her own carnets, which, begun in 1943, still continue today.4 ‘Interludes’ in her work as painter and engraver she may well deem her carnets to be, but they number more than sixty today and are painted, textless diaries of all sizes often offering images of ‘the simplest things of nature’, she tells Silvia Baron Supervielle, but equally capable of the most beautifully elegant ‘abstract’ but viscerally surging forms such as that shown with its red instinctual-cum-meditative jottings at the 2006 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper Exhibition (cat. fig. XVII) or, again, the Rythme diary of 1995, exhibited in 2008 at the Musée Lambinet in Versailles, this time revealing one vast, continuous brushstroke running through the diary’s Chinese-style concertina-ed pages to its explosive climax of a blue and purple ‘overall’, followed by an epilogue, so to speak, of white and blue flecking. Interludes, then, yes, and never preparatory acts thinking of larger oils to come; but significant life-long gestures that, one trusts, one day may be shown in their coherent and hybrid entirety and appreciated in the fullness of their independent and interconnected plastic beauty.

4

Diaries that the artist was kind enough to show me in her studio.


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The movement from carnet to illustrated book comes, however, largely through Geneviève Asse’s love of paper, its strict materiality, her family’s connection with publishing and writing, her sensitivity to the long tradition paper represents. And, of course, through her encounter with Pierre Lecuire with whom half of her books have been made. A sensitivity to formatting, to the book’s architecture, at once globally and with respect to the visual harmony of a given single page, to the oblique, never flatly illustrative, but intuitively sensed relationship between written text and plastic gesture – these qualities are ever manifest whether her gesture seeks to meld and fuse with the poetry of André Frénaud, André du Bouchet, Silvia Baron Supervielle or Borges. L’Air, for example, a book gathering work by Lecuire, leads to Asse’s own aerations, twelve drypoints, light, soaring, she feels, upon the ‘joy’ of the Chine paper used to deploy the nine cahiers of the 1969 livre d’artiste. The 1989 edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et fin de la neige is, for Asse, ‘a kind of precious diary-like book’, offered as a Chinese folded work with its prints and oils and use of phototype, a book moreover of which Bonnefoy reveals the perhaps surprisingly near-ekphrastic quality, ‘the poem in several of its parts [being] almost born from your maquette in which architectural elements appear but equally dissipate’. Geneviève Asse’s 1977 work with André Frénaud, resulting in the beautifully conceived and executed drypoint and diamond-point engravings for his powerful poem of passing and ‘inheriting’, Haeres, succeeds in maintaining all of the painter-engraver’s most distinguishing qualities whilst subtly marrying, with her stela-like tombal forms, now luminous, now blue-aquatinted, the strange sacredness of death’s imbrications with life. The 1972 engravings offered Samuel Beckett’s Abandonné, on the other hand, attain to a formal, engraved minimalness perhaps echoing the voidedness of abandonment, yet emphasising, for Beckett as for Asse, that residual human doing, that conscious, persistent poiein awaiting the unravelling of the logic of being’s tribulations and often improbably compensating energies. Of course, collaborations such as these arise from mutual respect and a recognition of ontological affinities which an exchange of aesthetic gestures may honour and celebrate; there is no need to mutually analyse, for all such creative gestures are predicated on the deep and essential authenticity of the individual artist’s/writer’s liberty. Thus, to collaborate with André du Bouchet in making a livre d’artiste edition of Ici en deux (1982) requires far less

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a detailed critical decoding of his complex text than a global appreciation of his oeuvre, as well as a sense of the manner and mode of his inscription of self in the world via his chosen medium, (the) language (of poetry).5 The eleven works retained to accompany André du Bouchet’s characteristically splayed but continuous text thus reveal discreet, ever changing motifs of division, partition – but connection, joinedness, too, in the macrospace ‘here’ –, motifs of the earth’s horizontality and that verticality Geneviève Asse sees, in lines, stelae, as the sign of what Frénaud too regarded, in Ubac’s sculptures, as that standing, enduring human presence in the face of adversity or plain ontological mystery. Asse’s work, eleven pochoirs binding together Borges’ ‘long, strong book’, Les Conjurés (1990), opts for a vermilion red inspired by Picasso’s accompanying of Reverdy’s posthumously published Le Chant des morts, as wonderful a poème d’adieu as one might hope to write. A rare red to mark the coruscating power of theme and articulation of Borges’ Les Conjurés – which, too, turns out to be a poem of last rites –, it is a colour that can suddenly surge forth from, as Françoise Quignard writes, the hand of a ‘painter centred on life more than theories’: a visceral choice, like that informing a 2001 carnet or finding its minimal place in paintings such as the 2003 Cercle I (with its thin vertical red band halving-joining the as ever tonally hybrid blue), the 2003 Fil rouge (with a central vertical band that includes a tenuous red thread, as well as the thinnest but smallest of red bases for this stela-within-a-stela, where blue yet dominates) or, again, her curious 2001 Cercle rouge (a drypoint and burin print, highlighted by a vertical and rectangular vermilion aquatint containing the faintest echo of the circle and fanned half-circle above, the whole a most delicate balance of symmetry and slight displacement). We now have a fairly clear picture of the principal chosen creative modes of Geneviève Asse, both respectful of long traditions: oil painting and engraving. Let me add here, however, before turning our attention to a more focussed and probing examination of the why and the meaning of an art still puzzling some, two observations. Firstly, oil painting never opts for thick application, this, no doubt,

5

For other imbrications of André du Bouchet’s work with artists and poets, see my Altérités d’André du Bouchet: de Hugo, Shakespeare et Poussin à Celan, Mandelstam et Giacometti (Rodopi, 2003).


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being part of an overall desire for transparency and the subtle shimmer of chromatic reality, and perhaps connected with a determination to paint exclusively in that natural light whose ever shifting modulations dovetail so intimately with her own aesthetics of myriad tonality within constancy. Secondly, whilst the act of engraving can lead many artists to emphasise finesse and multiplication of line, Geneviève Asse invariably opts for delicacy, understatement, an ‘ancient writing’ – as she deems etching to be – that, in its amplification of ambient white space, reminds us of the discretion, the tentativeness and the secrecy, of all inscription, whether light-fingered skimming of the surface of the plate, or more deeply scouring, digging literally, into the enigma of matter to reveal some small trace of the latter. Modes and a physicality of doing that fuse seamlessly with what we may view as art’s ontological pertinence as I shall now seek to characterise it for the painter of Lumière - Sénanque (1971) or Diagonale (1988). That the work of Geneviève Asse – from, by way of example, her 1969 oil Portes cercle to her 2003 oil Verticalité, from her 1942 lithograph Objets à travers une vitre to her 1999 drypoint and aquatint Rouge fleur – moves between tenuousness and relative monumentality (though never at all on the scale of a Garouste or the installations of a Louise Bourgeois or an Annette Messager), between constancy and non-fixity of format, chromatics and (a)representation, suggests that a major motivational criterion, hybrid but unified, is a desire for a newness ever infused with a sense of fidelity. Although her gestures she will rightly deem to be ‘all one’, each remains as unique as every flake of snow. In a similar way, her early work, centred on the nature morte, is thoroughly imbricated with the ever varying interiors that will ensue, these, in turn, being inseparable from the art of the 1970’s on, which, though so frequently deemed abstract, is as deeply embedded in an intuitive knowledge and intimate experience of the real as are the early objects, ateliers, windows, and so on. All Asse’s art, in brief, finds its rich and elliptically meaningful maximality within a capacity, inherited from her Breton childhood, to see plenitude, beauty, happiness at the heart of what we all too quickly may dismiss as minimal or simply bypass in haste. Asse’s spontaneity of execution, too, allied to her supposed incapacity, which I take to be a desire, ‘never to radically modify or correct’, suggests also a deep will, and willingness, to be free of finicky constraint, regret and even guilt, to

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find in the moment of poiein, of doing, a sufficient joy, at once of surprise, of harmonisation of gesture and instinct, of pure and honest coincidence with her total emerging being. Conception and pertinence do not so much precede, as theoretical constructs; rather do they become synonymous, simultaneous, with the very act of creation-cumself-creation, the latter blossoming at once as a disruption, a tearing free from the pre-existing (to which the artist remains yet conjoined), and as a reequilibration whereby newness finds its place within the vast unfoldment of art and being, Asse’s, the entire earth’s. The tautness (of line, forms, format, etc.) many can point to in an art certainly, as we have seen, sensitive to orchestration, a seeming geometry of presence and its contents – such arguable tautness yet fuses, in Geneviève Asse’s work, with what I can only term a fundamental tenderness. To paint and to engrave thus entails concentration, discipline, extemporaneous attention to a kind of profound mathematics of the real producing configurations, embodiments, formal, aesthetic relationships, anatomies of presence. Yet, simultaneously, to paint, to engrave, is a gesture that leaps, as it were, through the mirror of form into the formlessness underpinning it, thus becoming at ease with questions (that become non-questions) of representation, specific saying, meaning: the tender embrace thereof is resolution enough and responds to any ‘why’ of Geneviève Asse’s plastic art. Thus do formal, aesthetic, even intellectual values meld completely in works such as, say, Ouverture lumière (1973-74) or the previously mentioned Fil rouge (2002), or, again, the beautiful print, oil and phototype creations for Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et fin de la neige – meld completely, that is, with barely sayable spiritual and ontological values, pertinence and motivation. Whether it is an exquisite engraving such as that done for the 1969 Livres de Pierre Lecuire (with its quick, evocative delicacy of line), or the 2001 oil on paper Deux verticales rouges (where lines feather, their ‘imperfection [becomes their] summit’, as Yves Bonnefoy might say), precision sheds its need for absoluteness, the real (of being and of art’s materialised forms) is embraced in its shimmer, its depth, its intuited but never truly speakable knownness. It is a wonderful accomplishment, a giving of meaning where no precise naming thereof is feasible. An art of interiorness in more ways than one. No wonder Geneviève Asse tells us that ‘one can’t learn to paint’: no system, no model, no imitation: all becomes self-discovery, a finding of the self, and self’s poietic, self-inscriptive power, in the midst of the


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real’s impalpable sureness. An art, then, buoyed up by a deep motivation, of intimacy, of intimate engagement with the presence of what is in the silence of the teeming discourse of its energy. The seeming bareness of Asse’s art, its discretion and its soberness: these are the manners of its, and her, intense jubilation. A jubilation of the inscribed transparency of the ineffableness of the experience of the real. And blue, in its non-absoluteness, yet its trembling orientation of Asse’s inner gaze, as the vast medium of her acquired serenity, her joy, a coincidence with the self’s ease and her sense of a profound, but uplifting mystery somehow strangely ‘writable’, beyond words. Three works, all oils, of varying formats, around which to focus some words of conclusion: Geneviève Asse’s 1943 Hommage à Chardin (23 x 35 cm), her 1978 Espace (150 x 150 cm) and her 2002 Entre la lumière (245 x 125 cm). The earliest of these three paintings offers forms reminiscent of, but not definitively attributable to identifiable objects; perspective, flattened, gives way to purely plastic space; a limited but delicately shifting, vibrant palette of blues, greys, ocres is chosen, lit by an earthy red sweep; firm geometry yields to a liberating personalised harmony; the title speaks of an art given over to the things of the earth, yet the painting itself pulls us into its own glimmering, discreet alchemy, ever hinting at the strangeness, but the beauty too, of being’s contents. Espace, employing collaged blue oil on paper framing bands of slightly varying width both left and right of the substantial central ‘panel’ of what we may deem a window, or door-like, opened retable, is the epitome of a simplicity become synonymous with, not so much rationalisable complexity, decodable givenness, but rather, the sheer ineffable mystery of light, space, atmosphere, indeed beingness itself, the central panel plunging us into a space/no-space – that non-lieu we have seen Titus-Carmel call it – of whiteness flecked and melded with the softest traces of the collaged blue bands. The pure azure, a Mallarmé might see through this pseudo-window; the intoxication of poetical or mystical space, others might sense or dream, along with a Baudelaire. Entre la lumière resembles the various stelae Geneviève Asse has given us in recent years, but its monolithic verticalness is sliced down the middle by a varyingly luminous white line shadowed by, even fused with, another, bluish-grey, giving to the large two-panelled space a thin ascensional betweenness that, oddly, seems to contradict the title’s assertion: sure-

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ly, we ask, is not the light between the opaquish-blue panels – unless we read the title as a dramatic, theatrical inverted statement: enter light. Once more, it would be inadequate to see a painting such as this as founding a plastic space of simply formal, structural, architectural qualities and implications. However, if Valérie Lagier is correct in saying, as I believe she is, and as Asse herself can suggest, that this is an art ‘lead[ing] the gaze towards a beyondness of painting’, this beyondness has no firm delineation, for, whilst intimately obeying a living sensibility, it generates silence, unspokeness, unsayableness rather than solidified discourse. None of these paintings, and characteristically, carries with it a neatly articulated moralism, an ethical lesson attached to the earth’s, to society’s specificities. None pour forths a lyricism either of anguish, horror, ennui, or, for that matter, of defined pleasure, delight; though, equally, there is no avoidance of sensibility’s subtleties. If form and space can fascinate, they lead to no brisk and depersonalised mathematicisation. No fear is visible of a seemingly limited concentration of modes, methods, materials, for such is the avenue accessing the self’s deep uniqueness. No fear of past tradition, nor any wild and wilful experimentalism; no aesthetic provocation, nor any reluctance to audaciously explore an espoused ‘marginality’. No gratuitous play, but, then, no hesitation to see her plastic gesture as affording freedom and spontaneous adventure. Further, far further, than a strictly aesthetic agenda, there lies, ever widening and deepening, an agenda of coincidence with the intimate, silent truth of immersion in earth’s, in incarnation’s, mysterious, even sacred, ‘presence’, a presence ever contemplatable, infinite, beyond anecdotalness, beauteous in its strange transparency that fuses with energies beyond, but somehow at the centre of hard materiality. A visual art of the invisible.

HYGIENE, THOUGHT, QUEST, CONSENT: MARTIAL RAYSSE Didier Semin reaches the conclusion, at the end of his excellent 1992 essay, Martial Raysse, alias Hermès: la voie des images, that ‘the spectacle of his paintings is one of the most sumptuous and most troubling one can witness today’, a conclusion it would be difficult to disagree with given the luxuriant wealth of image and object Raysse’s oeuvre generates, from the earliest masks and Prisunic assemblages, to the technicolour transform ations of a pseudo-pop art and the phantasmagorical ostentations of his films and videos, and down to his intimately lived contemporary allegories and myths, whether of Buddha or Bacchus or some new utopian Republic. I should add, simply, and despite Philippe Dagen’s sense of the disturbing carnavalesque quality of the more recent work, that Raysse’s superbly diverse yet unified gesture, that of a ‘most rare poet’ as Cocteau wrote in the earliest of days, troubles far less than it provokes thought, urges us to think our relation to the real, both microcosmic, daily phenomena and the macrocosm in which the latter deploy themselves, indeed invites us even to consent to energies of ease, embrace and freedom that dominant ideologies may discourage us from sensing to be available to us. Martial Raysse’s art is an art that, from the outset and with the same intensity today, seeks always to measure its own pertinence and purpose, this not merely at all in aesthetic terms, but, too, in a large existential and – in the broadest sense of the term – spiritual perspective. His work has led to numerous contacts with, and contemplations of, other major contemporary artists as well as to a meditation of the significance, now, for the ever shifting modernity we are living, of the various démarches of artists and great masters of art’s long history. Initially hailed by Ben Vautier, who awards him the Prix du Laboratoire 32, a prize Ben surely would dearly have preferred to offer to his own smilingly egotistic self, then close to Arman above all in what Claude Rivière called the École de Nice, Raysse neither moves, finally, in the direction of Fluxus nor lingers long with the nouveaux réalistes and their privileging of a direct, non-lyrical, non-figurative, non-abstractive apprehension of the elements of the real. Raysse’s creative trajectory, whilst intersecting with much contemp-orary and

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indeed earlier artistic production fruitfully, at times provocatively, contestatarily, though always thoughtfully and with an understanding of epochal difference, soon begins to mark out its own probing, ever developing distinctiveness. His encounters with Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in New York allow appreciation of the other and a further catalyzing of his own growing ‘hygiene of vision’. Not dissimilarly, the impact of the work of Rauschenberg and Oldenburg, though stimulating and permitting a sensing of affinities, will not distract Raysse from a meticulous thinking through of his own potential – and the same may be said with regard to the orientations implicit in Warhol’s pop art or Pollock’s abstract expressionism, orientations he was able closely to examine in his various long stays in the USA in the 1960’s. His own work of this period, the 1964 Made in Japan series, for example, or the wonderful 1966 Express certain Psychological Definitions: and so what about the chicken?, reveals a postBaudelairian ‘painter of modern life’ boldly, half-impertinently but ever fully pertinently, plunging into the great works of Ingres and Cranach, Ghirlandaio and Tintoretto, or else the supermodel images of the day, transforming, ironising, inventing, pointedly and mirthfully unveiling at once past and ultramodernity to those who might see beyond the gloss and subtexts of both. Of course, comparisons are odious, and many have been hinted at in the case of Martial Raysse. Hélion, Chirico, Dix, Didier Semin has invited us to contemplate, not without relevance though every specific detail of Raysse’s work, from, say, the 1963 Le Rêve, the 1978 Spelunca series or his 1990 Georges et le Dragon seems finally to defy such sympathetic assertions.1 Raysse has his own admirations and hesitancies: the latter, for example, with Matisse and Mondrian for their flattening of that perspective into which Raysse’s art finally grows; the former with, say, Dossi or Poussin or Da Vinci, for their conveyance of telluric depth, nuance, the implicit plenitude of incarnation. Alain Jouffroy has been tempted to go so far as to affirm Raysse’s orchestration of an ‘anti-Cézannian revolution’ in his placing of ethics before form, and, it is true, Raysse’s evaluation of Vuillard’s art privileges, over any com-positional merits it may possess, the meaning of colour’s sensuousness, its, I should argue, implicit penetration into the visceral-cum-spiritual beauty of earthy expe1

See Selected Bibliography. No personal website is available, but www.artcyclopedia.com offers many online leads.

Hygiene, Thought, Quest, Consent: Martial Raysse

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rience. As we shall observe, Martial Raysse’s ongoing ‘hygiene of vision’ tends to sweep away all but his own equations, allowing him to view the collective poietic gestures lived and still behind the 1974 Coco Mato works as just as deeply pertinent as the vast richly, often enigmatically, ever stimulatingly allegorical canvases of the 1990’s, Le Carnaval à Périgueux (1992), for example, or Mais dites une seule parole (1995) or, again, La Folie Antoine (1999). If the teeming specificities of Raysse’s art quickly and rightly flood our consciousness, urging us to sense a marked distance from, say, François Morellet’s mathematics, Louise Bourgeois’ projected anxieties, or Claude Viallat’s seemingly abstracting a-signatures, and, just possibly only, a glimmer of connection with Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s ultimate desire for an oeuvre ‘of generosity, of ampleness’, with the ethico-spiritual underpinnings of Gérard Garouste’s démarche, it may be said to remain true that all such specificities – to which I shall now attend – all such differences, all such shimmering interfiguralities, somehow find their point of convergence in art’s, in the artist’s, endless tussle with what Gérard Titus-Carmel has termed our ‘presence to the world’. The various works of Martial Raysse’s Hygiène de la Vision, together with the writings that have parenthetically accompanied the series, lie at the operational and notional centre of his most publicly acclaimed period. ‘A new, pure, aseptic world’ of art he felt himself to be inaugurating, and who would argue against him when gazing upon works such as Arbre (1959) or Supermarché, magie multicolore (1960) or the gathered pieces of the 1960 Étalage Hygiène de la Vision. No wonder Raysse saw the Prisunic stores as the museums of a new age. Creation as previously conceived seemed barely necessary when it preexisted out there, everywhere, and just required a gesture of showcasing in all of its serenity and unalterableness – factors serving, moreover, as a subtext to Raysse’s flight from the visible disorderliness of poverty and the anxiety of mortality. ‘The theory of the École de Nice, he argued, is that life is more beautiful than anything’ – a theory, like the root notion of a ‘hygiene of vision’, that, in its various avatars, will not ever be released: the recycling of discarded materials of the 50’s, the embrace of the amazing explosion of consumer goods in the 60’s, the wild, ludic jubilancy of both his 1962 Raysse Beach installation and the equally exuberant imaginative extravanganza, at once farewell and new vision, of his 1970 film Le Grand

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Départ, the simplicities of doing and being works like Loco Bello will emblematise throughout the 1970’s, the welcoming of life’s often scruffy but sure energies in works such as the 1991 Enfance de Bacchus, the many portraits, both soft, easeful and harder-edged of the 1990s`s and into the new millennium: all such work points to a privileging of life’s extraordinariness, its astonishing offeredness, over art as an act and place of either somewhat aloof disconnectedness or flagrant transcendence of the immanent. The Hygiène de la Visison work proper is predicated on ‘propositions’ and working ‘hypotheses’ and will eventually lead to his idea put into practice of une forme en liberté, whereby simplification, evacuation of all but fundamental line, a kind of sterilisation of form will allow for a freedom of imaginative self-insertion into a voided structure that yet provides the occasion of some paradoxical enrichment, as with arte povera or certain minimalisms. But, lest we imagine such a conclusion to his ultimately – and in the best sense of the term – experimental work of the early 1960’s is too theoretical, too purely notional, let us not forget, firstly, that this ‘new conception of the world’ is driven by a powerful desire boldly to engage both materially, plasticly, and in socio-ethico-political terms with the earth’s hypermodern becoming, and, secondly, with a need, even greater, and never ending, to, as he put it in his 1984 beautifully titled address to the audience at the Musée national d’Art moderne, ‘see more clearly’:2 there is, in works like De l’autre côté du cerceau (1976) or L’Échange (1978), no surrender, no acquiescence, for here, as throughout all of the work to come and right down to the present, we have an art and a gesture free, meditative, in turns and often simultaneously smilingly, gently sardonic and enthused, ever thinking and rethinking its own experience and unending Rimbaud-like ‘invention’ of life’s ways of meaning and purpose. Just as the 1960 Colonne en cosmonaute moves on from the masks and mobiles of the 1950’s, without denying them, moreover, so does Cela s’appelle l’aurore (1964), in the midst of Raysse’s early hygienics and ‘high tension’ painting, prefigure series such as Loco Bello (1976) and Un Jardin au bord de la lune (1980), the existential implications of these paintings 2 The title of Raysse’s address: ‘On a few words about Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians up until: how long is the road leading to my blonde’.


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and drawings and the life experiences significantly underpinning them being further contemplated, challenged, ‘more clearly seen’ in the light of a subsequent, perpetually becoming, and I should maintain, despite certain appearances, profoundly unified ethical, spiritual and sensual livednesss that will give us works as varied, though polyphonic rather than dissonant, as the 1988 Fontaine de la Place du Marché in Nîmes, the 1996 Brioche mon coeur or the 1997 Ébauche du lutin ‘chapelle feu’. In short, Martial Raysse’s entire plastic oeuvre is marked by a ceaseless capacity of self-awareness, self-critiquing and selfexploration. Alfred Pacquement and Robert Calle argue that Raysse never hesitates to switch perception of self, and in consequence to ‘change self’s image’, but, of course, there is nothing arbitrary in such self-modification and Alain Jouffroy believes the latter has to do with Raysse’s ‘capacity for distancing self in relation to his own painting as in his relation to modern art in general’. ‘Intelligibility’, Martial Raysse has commonly insisted, should dictate the thought of art. His Hygiène de la Vision, like the quasi-manifesto he articulates in connection with the various works of this series, powerfully intends such intelligibility. Whilst not didactic, it already founds that ethics of interrogation, meditation and debate of modernity – i.e. of modern life – into which later works will continually delve – and, by and large, as the years go by, the metaphenomenon of commentary will yield a more or less total place to the direct impact of the plastic, whether this impact may be deemed more immediately apprehendable as with his many portraits3 or the Petite Maison paintings of 1981, or less simply penetrable and decidable as with, for some, Le Carnaval à Périgueux or even the representationally accessible but enigmatically, though delightfully, titled Je sais ce qu’il en est de vous mais ... of 1999. Intelligibility in Martial Raysse’s work, however, implies neither banal

3

Portraiture continues today to fascinate Raysse, witness his Belle sans fin (2006), his Oui chéri (2008) or his Beauté (2008), the latter two works acrylic on canvas, the first work mixted technique and collage. All feature female presence, Belle sans fin resembling in more delightfully fluid fashion (gouache and felt pen) his whimsical new acrylic work titled Re mon cher maître (2007), in itself a ‘remake’ of his early celebrated pseudo-pop-art Ingres piece, while Oui chéri and Beauté offer the intensity of that strange even quirky facial enigma speaking of a human presence a Giacometti will explore, repeatedly, obsessively, but in radically different ways.

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flagrancy nor hermetic esotericism. Rather does it demand an honest desire and effort to think through life’s strange simplicities, its upliftments and its puzzlements, as well as its forgotten or future possibilities. The ‘intelligence’ Raysse offers is thus often quite implicit and often increasingly allegorical. What the last two works mentioned figure precisely in moral, social and spiritual terms remains open, rich, tantalising, for the Rayssian concept of intelligibleness implies no ideology: it invites, provokes, smiles, always with an odd combination of intenseness and ease. As Didier Ottinger has suggested, alluding to Walter Benjamin’s own conclusion, allegory may offer the only possible efficaciousness of art today in dealing with the ‘disenchantments’ of the contemporary world, and certainly such work by Raysse confronts our large conception of the entire History of Art ‘without putting a line right through it’, Semin judiciously adds. To speak or paint publicly, but as an other, via otherness (: allegorein), can allow a Philippe Dagen, writing in Le Monde, to argue that Le Carnaval à Périgueux gives us Raysse’s ‘troubling strangeness ... at its peak’, whilst seeing – seeing clearly – in it a ‘contemporary vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream enriched by allusions to today and personal allegories’. If this may be deemed so, as indeed it may, then Raysse may be said to have generated a profoundly rich allegor-ical postmodernity. Not that Raysse seems to harbour any desire to create postmodern art as such. Art is an avenue to life’s rich poeticity, the astonishing poiein (making, doing, creation) it already contains and which art’s own poietic gesture may seek to speak as its other. Martial Raysse never ceases to emphasise both the importance of art’s relation to life, and, more significantly, the particular nature of that relation. ‘Painting, he insists, is not an imitation of life, it is a recreation.’ In arguing thusly, he joins the great ‘realist’ Balzac, and the great theoretician of art and poetry, Reverdy. Restructuring of the elements of the real, making them into ‘objects’, as he calls them, avoids the illusionism of mimesis. One can think not just here of the 1958-59 plastic boxes that simply gather and encase the given yet in so doing affirm their appropriation and new distinction, but also of a more complex shift occurring in, let us say, the 1992 Ceux du maquis where a certain half-enchanted hyperrealism marries a swirling strangeness, that kind of dramatic, but unravellable intensity of human activity other work such as Le Soir Antoine! or Ébauche du lutin ‘cha-


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pelle feu’ (1997) also can lay before us. For Raysse, transformation is the key to the art-life relationship – but not for purely aesthetic reasons at all, rather as a transformation of the lived itself: a changing, that is, of life itself, by means of a change in one’s (: artist’s and viewer’s) consciousness of received representation. It is precisely this poetics and the action stemming from it that distinguishes Raysse’s incursions into Pop Art from, say, Warhol’s: they are, Véronique Dabin argues, ‘more intellectual and satirical than anglo-american pop’. More ‘utopian’, too, oddly, as Alain Jouffroy is right to observe, but also more genuinely ludic, at ease, witty. Transformation can be hostile, violent, acidic, but not with Martial Raysse. The ironies of pastiche are visible, yes, and, as Raysse will tell us at the time of his 1985 finely titled Amsterdam exhibition, Martial Raysse, maître et esclave de l’imagination, inversion, subversion, that is the artist’s domain: a turning over, around, a provocative (yet caressive, too, for Raysse) upsetting of our standard, essentially passive and accepting modes of perception and thinking: to gaze upon – and think through – Étalage de Prisunic (1961), La Petite Maison (1981), La Surprise (1988) or Giotto renversé par un porc, is to run through the various modes of inverting and subverting in which Raysse delights and excels: in all cases they invite, point to new contemplation, mild or more truly puzzling astonishments available, and always do they eschew mere reproduction despite the deceptive simplicities they may deploy. Again, Notre Dame de Bonne Espérance (1981) is a fine example, smiling, tongue-in-cheek, quirky, yet never gratuitous, for predicated on the real, deep significance of love’s spiritual and carnal mystery: a subversion, in effect, ever uplifting, seeking, as we shall subsequently show, value, an upheaval that shifts energy from the conceivable undermining of subversion. If Martial Raysse quits his place amongst the celebrities of the contemporary American and European art world in the late 1960’s, moved by the 1968 ‘revolution’ back in France, it is no doubt due to a sense of the power of such a world’s glossiness to swamp out other socio-ethical ambition his own démarche sought to maintain and that 1968 seemed, despite its contradictions, to promise to realise. His founding of a commune, the giving of himself to collective artistico-existential gestures – ‘our work is we ourselves’, he explained in a 1972 interview4 –, the subsequent Coco Mato exhibition 4

In Réalités, 139.

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of arguably unsophisticated, unpolished, yet motivated ‘things’ (as he preferred to call them), the marked contemplative intimacy of much work that follows, as well as the public art where personal ethics and, in the broad sense, spirituality, meditation on one’s being-in-theworld-with-others, marries larger social vision: I am thinking, of course, of his Fontaine for the City of Nîmes, his Sol et Colombe for the Conseil économique et social on the Place d’Iéna in Paris, his Derniers Montagnards, all of the late 1980’s, and why not mention his project for the 1982 Universal Exhibition which he titled Les Chemins de la Liberté: all of these works, and others, speak to the logic underlying Raysse’s only seemingly abrupt turning away from a mode of artistic performance and a vast materialistic art world machine threatening to drown out, precisely, the kinds of intimate, deeply personal life projects Raysse’s work implied, and the vision, ever growing as his work and life matured, which he sought simply, unpretentiously, yet transformatively, to share with a wider public audience. Reality, lived, observed realness, the artist’s ‘model’, Raysse tells us, is ever ‘only a means, never an end’: transformation, once again, is at the core of painting, sculpting, drawing. Art’s gesture: an ever becoming self-transformative act. The resultant work(s): ‘a sismographic account, he shrewdly notes, of the psychological variations of the act of painting as an act of life’. Each work by Martial Raysse, in short, we may view as nothing more, but nothing less, than a mental-emotionalpsychical-meditative trace or mark, via art, as art, but art as, most importantly, an ‘act of life’, a creation of self, a material deployment, an actualisation of life’s psychic potentialities. Such potentialities have been explored in Raysse’s case via a full range of poietic doing: painting, drawing, film, video, sculpture, the creation of objects, ‘things’, poetry, other writing, opera and ballet decors, all involving the use of a significant gamut of techniques. As for the modes of Martial Raysse’s doing, his poiein, it is largely fair to say that they are hybridised, interconnective in nature, never inclined to retreat in some modal isolationism. His ‘painting’ can thus involve the use of neon, television, photography; his films and videos not only bear reference to the work of, for example, Delacroix or Ingres – just as he can say, inversely, of creations such as his 1967 Identité, maintenant vous êtes un Martial Raysse, that ‘TV in my work replaces the madonnas in Da Vinci’s’ – but opt also for that ‘chromatic movement’


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to which Patrick de Haas has rightly given weight in noting the frequent indeterminacy of shape and presence at play in Raysse’s cinematographic images; the theatrical decors created for Roland Petit’s 1966 Éloge de la Folie and his 1967 Lost Paradise (put on at London’s Covent Garden and then the Paris Opera, with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev) involve spectacular neon colour, a vast painted multi-panelled illuminated backcloth, modernly simple costumes, too, for the second ballet, and an application of his painterly technique of ‘variable geometry’; his major sculptures can merge the play of light and colour, as well as the use of coloured mosaics in the symbols of the metopas for the Sol et Colombe creation; and so on, with his early poèmes-objets or his poetic texts accompanying the 1976 Loco Bello exhibition. Before looking further at the various techniques that characterise Martial Raysse’s creative manners, it is worth reminding ourselves of two things: firstly, that, as he most pertinently insists – for it is all too easy to mistake means for ends, be blinded by them at the expense of art’s deeper purposes and worth –, ‘the essential lies not in techniques but in the use made of them’; secondly, that Raysse will always remain, in consequence, an ‘engineer of vision’, as he buoyantly remarks, but of a seeing not just flashily or oddly aesthetic, i.e. not just a seeing of surface effect and shimmer, but a vision profoundly centred on, as I have sought already to emphasize, meaning, ethics, the fundamental yet swirlingly challenging pertinence of existence as our ever becoming consciousness may allow us to perceive it. This said, and in this perspective, I should like to examine, in necessarily most compacted fashion, some eight of Martial Raysse’s diverse and often innovative techniques: 1: photography is, of course, the most noticeable element of Raysse’s work of the 1960’s, though it is essentially recycled photography, as with the Made in Japan series or 1965 pieces such as his Peinture à haute tension or 14 juillet, Tableau à géométrie variable, a recycling either of images of anonymous women models or of photo-reproductions of famous paintings of women, and a recycling not raw, but very much ‘cooked’, a powerfully appropriative and transformative recycling;

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2: colour is the means so often in this latter work of such appropriation, and with this appropriation, of a simultaneous highlighting of modernity’s ‘astonishments’ and ironic subversion thereof: colour is brilliant, technicolour, ‘martialcolor’ as he can pushily and wittily write, it can be fluorescent or applied by a process of flocage whereby plastic fibre paint is sprayed onto the photograph, uniformising and rendering somewhat schematic the pseudo-presence of the figure; 3: neon, of course, completes the range of colouring techniques of this period: Peinture à haute tension is again a stunning example, as are the decors done for the Roland Petit ballets; 4: Béatrice Salmon has spoken of Raysse’s ‘hybridising of painting through cinema’ and it is important to observe not just this willed slippage from medium to medium, but, to my mind, once again the remarkable colours achieved, their blending and consequently produced fusion of forms: few filmmakers have been so chromatically, and thus amimetically, bold; moreover, as Pontus Hulten has observed, but here he has in mind the paintings of the 1970-1980 period such as Loco Bello – Raysse’s work on canvas or paper can give us ‘brilliant colour not seen since Renoir’ – indeed, just as Raysse has spoken of the generalisable application of a concept of form in his 1960’s work, one might argue a similar complementary logic for the application in his work of a concept of colour, where, incidentally, black can often play a forceful contrastive role: 5: the materials used in painting and drawing are not in themselves exceptional: acrylic, watercolour, industrial and oil paint, the latter rarely however; pencil, charcoal, pastel; tempera becomes dominant in the 1970’s and remains so today – a choice demanding deftness and one that is fairly unforgiving – and relatively inhabitually opted for by artists today. The surfaces used by Raysse are many: wood, paper, canvas, polystyrene or plywood occasionally, cardboard, thick-glued paper, etc. Both surface and materials may involve a mixture of techniques: one could point to the tiny (21 x 18 cm) 1965


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Pablo, a gouache on photocopy thick-glued onto canvas , with aluminium and plastic; or to, say, the 1962 mixed media ‘painting’ Miroir aux houppettes, with its assembled objects (make-up case, powder puffs, mirror, photograph, plastic accoutrements) on paper, variously touched up with paint, and mounted; 6: assembly and bricolage mark the earlier years rather more, though if one extends such techniques conceptually to include not only collage, which becomes a significant technique, but also what we might think of as compositional assembly of a heteroclitic nature – Le Carnaval à Périgueux for example, but, of course, too, the wondrous medly Coco Mato affords, or, indeed, the undoubtedly unified but fabled heterogeneity of Martial Raysse’s oeuvre taken as a whole: if we can see such a principle of gathering and piecing together – did he not delightfully state to Le Journal de Genève in 1966 ‘I make anything whatsoever with anything whatsoever’? – as freely applicable, though ever motivated by Raysse’s visualvisionary ‘engineering’, then, I believe, we come closer to understanding the creative modus operandi Raysse ceaselessly deploys; 7: whilst the frame for Raysse’s painted and drawn work remains in place, it no longer has the binding, constraining capacity of most such work: elements may overflow the limits of the frame, as with Pablo (1965) or Yellow Rose (1964); Raysse can offer us the framed piece whilst simultaneously pointing to and actualising other work outside it, but now drawn into its frame of reference and function via the enlargement thereof: 14 juillet, tableau à géométrie variable (1965) is a fine example, and other techniques of doubling, leaping beyond the frame, exploding its tightness can be seen: Souviens-toi de Tahiti (1963), for instance; Nice-Venise pushes such a practice still further by giving us a large, single, macrocosmic work constituted of thirty or so separately framed and scattered microcosms, each viewable as a single film-like ‘frame’ of the entire sequence, which yet is a non-linear simultaneity; and then there are those many paintings of series such as Spelunca or La Petite Maison, where the painting

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proper chooses, as it were, to de-frame itself, operate a noncoincidence of available figural space and the figuration given: individual paintings such as L’Eau, le sang, les fruits (1978) or L’Hermaphrodite (1977) or again Le Balai (1979) thus establish their intimate functional and meditative oasis upon paper or wood, floating patches of dream, vision and allegory projected freely into their own microspatial infinities; 8: perspective in modern or postmodern art is a rare choice, of course, largely because representation is not typically at stake: it is, yet, a choice that Martial Raysse makes in the early 1970’s, this, moreover, after years of its occultation in a conscious gesture of ironising, a-mimesis. To resume perspectival painting and drawing allows the nuance and the depth of the real, as well as the implicit connection to the latter, the interconnectedness of people and all ambient phenomena, to emerge to the forefront of the mind. Perspective reengineers vision, gives us back, for example, those faces Giacometti sought to live and meditate after his relinquishment of the surrealist agenda in the mid-1930’s: Raysse’s multiplying portraits, though not cast in some larger perspectival space, yet convey delicacy of presence and can opt for the sfumato Raysse admired in, for example, Leonardo da Vinci; his Spelunca and Loco Bello paintings, but also more recent works such as E.K. (1985) or Brioche mon Coeur (1996), all provide a view – far from classically perspectival, to be sure – upon one’s possible relation to what Bonnefoy has called ‘the things of the simple’, light, trees, the few objects with which we may have daily intimate contact – one thinks immediately of the 1981 series, La Petite Maison, human beings in lived and cherishable place. The black pencil works, too, of 1980, Un Jardin au bord de la lune, though more classically perspectival and reminiscent of small pencilled pieces after Bronzino or Da Vinci, offer carefully caressive traces of close connection to rural, earthy, yet almost cosmic space fervently inhabited and known. In all cases, including the larger allegorical works, such as the 1989 La Source or the 1999 La Folie Antoine, perspective implies, more than anything else, the quest for meaning in self-other and self-world relations, the


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latter cast in an optic of friendship and embrace, ethical and spiritual reflection on our incarnation and the instincts, desires and purposes we may theatricise via such strange, now troubling, now marvellous being-in-the-world. One may easily be tempted in examining the full scope of Martial Raysse’s undoubtedly diversified plastic oeuvre to emphasise precisely the variables at the expense, conceivably, of the constancies, elastic as they may be, that yet hold his shifting but principled and self-rethinking gesture in the surprising coherency I should argue yet characterises it. We may, for example, be inclined to separate radically the 1962 Raysse Beach installation from the 1970 painting Le Sage, but we may also see them as exploring differently perceivable modes of a meditation of the utopian. Just as the material and the immanent may be felt to generate at deeper levels an intimate embrace of the spiritual, so do those many paintings by Raysse that give us the immediacy of our dailiness project the latter onto a cosmic backcloth. Le Pain et le vin (1995) achieves such a synthesis, just as, say, Le Soir Antoine!5may be said to do so with its swarming scene of human gathering, drama and even violence, in vast space lit by the intense blood-orange brilliance of a setting sun, and one could argue the symbolic pertinence of all those works that cast their microscenes into pure white, or again black (as with the [equally Christian] motif of the bread and wine paintings). In imbricated fashion, what may come across, as with a Gérard Garouste, as the enigmaticalness of the given (: one could argue this from the beginning: scrap metal or Prisunic objects, seen beyond their utilitarian appropriation) is simultaneously meditated for its symbolicalness: one thinks not just of Raysse’s contemplation of the symbolism of the (only seemingly) banal in the coat of arms for the city of Nîmes in his creation of the Fontaine de la Place du Marché, but, also purely by way of example, of Le Carnaval à Périgueux, where the puzzling parade of largely dubious human presence and comportment manifestly implies a discreet but powerful embrace of the ‘symbolic’ depth of meaning of the latter. Other manifest variables that would seem to suggest a dualistic, binary structuring of Rayssse’s imaginative universe might be said to pit the human 5

A preparatory version of this painting shows a less intensely focussed and slightly differently orchestrated scene of still high enigmatical turbulence.

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against nature, at least radically separating them; or else, via that return to the subject in art which so strikes Pacquement and Calle in their introduction to the superb catalogue for the 1992 Jeu de Paume exhibition, a return also to the subjective, better the relation of self (Raysse’s, but yours, mine, equally) to the other, any other. What yet seems clear, I should maintain, is that self and nature are sensed and lived as no more isolated from one another than are self and other human beings, despite infinite difference. La Source, for example, appears to plunge the virginalness of human presence (with its implicit generative, creative power as represented by the young woman) into an equally fertile and luminous earthy environment: we are back – no, we have never truly left it, if we so think: we can go farther than Novalis’ shattered (though still extant) paradise – in some Eden, some Origin-Now, of visualised symbiotic harmony. And, I should argue, more contentiously, even the early Colonne en cosmonaute or the Étalage de Prisunic, whilst querying and no doubt ironising, simultaneously are marvelling – at once at the ingenuity of humans, the astonishing material source the earth constitutes, even the conceivable transcendence of global material poverty the latter seem to promise. If we return to Le Carnaval à Périgueux or L’Enfance de Bacchus, where the question of the relation of self to other hovers, perhaps challengingly, provocatively, over Raysse’s gesture, the residual implication fuses, I believe, with that of those many other works where collectivity, fraternité, love, embrace of the other seem quite beyond debate: yes, difference reigns, but there is, far from it, no sense of separateness, superiority, disgust and consequent shying away. If anything, the artistic gesture of going towards the other’s ‘debatableness’, his or her ‘questionableness’, remains ever a dialogue, a coexistence, a recognition of sharedness, even a significant embrace of collective energy and its potentialities. The Chemins de la Liberté sketched project opens up a space wherein the carnavalesque, the polyphonic and the different can actualise what Édouard Glissant has thought of as a ‘poetics of relationality’:6 this would be the fulfilment of the questing Coco Mato speaks of, or the desire implicit in Raysse’s Graal paintings. Moreover, portrayals of Zia en Bacchante (1993) or of Lucien en Bacchus reveal to what degree Raysse does not isolate the ideal in some tight zone of prudishness or unsmiling disincarna6

See Poétique de la relation (Gallimard, 1990).


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tion. The only seemingly ‘lower’ variables of playfulness and sensual joy marry with ease the ‘higher’, more sober motivations that Sol et Colombe or Jean nupieds, général de l’armée de souffrance (1999) or Montsalvatché (1984) varyingly dramatise. What we may deem to be the polarising ironies that can inhabit Martial Raysse’s work – and, to my mind, they are just as visible in later works such as Le Salut soit sur la Dame si sage (1999) or Ainsi voici du coeur l’étrange parure (1999) as in works from the Hygiène de la Vision period – such ironies are utterly undivorceable from that visionariness, that clairvoyant, oracular, even though delightfully quixotic sense of what lies on the other side of the ironised. The variable of contestation always, in Raysse, implies an embrace, a dream, a fervent desire, of embrace. Together, they form a unified field of psychical energy projected onto screens both of ambiguity and rich implicitness, screens where what shines forth, from La France verte (1963) or Paysage champêtre en 15 tons (1963) to the exquisite 1994 Les six plats or the powerful Danse macabre, chapelle de pierre et feu of the same year, is an ever searching gaze into self and upon others, a constancy of questing, selfquerying vision via the inevitable ‘variables’ any one moment of experience and thought can produce. In the context of what precedes, three further points deserve our attention: the question of evolution in Raysse`s work, the question of beauty and the conception of the image. On the first matter, that of a shift in Raysse`s relation to plasticity, if we take his involvement with the nouveaux réalistes, clearly we can appreciate that, though newness may be emphasised, the root fascination and determination turns about the real: its ongoing rethinkableness or ‘revisionableness’, as he tends to see it. As early as 1965, and thus in the midst of works like Made in Japan but also Cela s’appelle l’aurore, in an interview with Jean-Jacques Lévêque for Arts, Raysse affirms that ‘I thought vision was a mental phenomenon. Now I only think vision is a sentimental phenomenon’. But what was the vision behind the various works of the 1950’s – Bleu Citron (1957), for example, or the wire sculptures and the mobiles? Mentalness, senti-mentalness? Ultimately, these works, like his Made in Japan en martialcolor, but also his Prairie, childish painting (1964) and the post-1970 works the latter piece only half-surprisingly may be said to prefigure – all are caught in the flow of a shifting, vacillating consciousness of the real, now

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more intellectually constrained, now more spontaneously emotional. Le Grand Départ is less a film that marks a radical turning that anticipates what Alain Jouffroy will describe, perhaps excessively, overly ideologically, as a discovery of everything industrial modernity ‘denies, upsets, masks and pollutes’, than a film (plunged up to its ears in modern technology) marking Raysse’s continuing, fluid, vigorous but funkily graceful traversal of the same real. The mutations Raysse operates in his envisioning of his Six Images calmes (1972) points to his capacity to, at once feistily and serenely, make this traversal, whether theorised, visceral, sensual or spiritual in the moment. Gilbert Lascault rightly argues, to my mind, the degree to which Loco Bello, though ‘resituating’ painting, does so without hostility – and it is precisely this seamlessness that I would have us attend to. What Didier Semin refers to as Raysse’s ‘initiatory path’ – even though he is thinking somewhat oppositionally in terms of a sociopolitical critique opening onto a space of spiritual transcendence – is a useful notion in that we may perceive the entirety of Raysse’s oeuvre as revealing his own initiation, his ever beginning penetration, into that vast place of multifacetted oneness, beyond all ‘binary reduction’, as Jouffroy now argues, that is his own consciousness of self and other, via art’s continuous mediation. The question of beauty reveals an equal elasticity of appreciation – an immutableness of sorts, that is, at the heart of its very variables. We cannot know for sure to what degree the very early fabrications and paintings, from the masks to the mobiles to Bleu citron or Coulée (1960) were held to offer aesthetic power: to the extent they were made, exhibited, not destroyed, we may assume that something of the ancient equation of the Good, the True and the Beautiful obtains in the eyes of Martial Raysse. The images of woman, locus of concentration of beauteousness for so many male artists for so long – not that this may not be said of Vigée Lebrun or Berthe Morisot – certainly will powerfully draw the art of Raysse and perhaps most notably, most publicly, in his pseudo-Pop Art period. Without fetishism, most critics concur, and, indeed, Raysse, whilst beyond a doubt recognising the formal beauty of perfectly structured features, can go so far as to write, in 1965, that ‘beauty is bad taste [...]. Bad taste is the dream of overly desired beauty’. It clearly is an equation requiring that we think it through: such beauty, presumably whether lived – better, dreamed –


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directly or through painting (: the beauty of the anonymous advertising models metamorphosed in Raysse’s 1960’s work) would imply the fetishism he eschewed but which phantasmatically haunts the minds of so many still today in the proliferation of its purely empty plasticity, if I may put it that way. ‘A work of art, Raysse can clarify in 1971 in Zoom, is not something beautiful to look at [...] its value is in being a school of thought’: the absoluteness of the fetishising gaze is thereby replaced by the mobility of a critical meditation of form, exteriority, whereby the latter is understood to require its placement within a socio-ethico-spiritual framework – not entirely unlike Baudelaire’s appreciation of the ephemeralness of beauty and formal perfection, or Mallarmé’s understanding in Un coup de dés of the failure of poetry to evacuate the undesirableness of the real and absolutise beauty. This, paradoxically, and rightly, does not prevent either Gilbert Lascault from arguing that Loco Bello is an incitement to gaze upon the beauty of being, or Françoise Viatte from maintaining that the drawings of this period, Un Jardin au bord de la lune, for example, constitute a ‘counterweight to poor taste’. And has not Raysse himself affirmed, beyond contradiction, that the art ... of life demands that ‘one chase off the idea of death. Through work, through beauty’? The entire logic of the image is, of course, intimately interwoven with what precedes. The beauty of art’s images above all, Raysse urges us to appreciate, must be seen through the lens of our consciousness of its illusoriness, its seemingness, with the idolatry it may readily induce. Didier Semin’s fine essay insists upon Raysse’s art as a ‘way of images’, and Raysse understands from beginning to end – and not just, I shoud argue, only in his pastiching, ironic pseudo-Pop Art period – that he is ‘a painter of simulacra’. Certainly, a work such as Miroir aux houppettes is a strong reminder that the image of self produced by a woman’s make-up is a perfect mise en abyme of the artist’s gesture and product. Of Raysse Beach, Martial Rayse writes: ‘I’ve never done painting. I realised after a while I was working on image’. Painting or no painting, the artistic mode produces masks, appearance, contrivance, what we have seen Reverdy call antinature, a theatre of form – every bit as much as it may be said – but perhaps quite minimally so – to stimulate reflection on the relation of such imaging to life’s deep, and daily, urgencies. When Ottinger suggests that Raysse’s 1963 Forme en liberté exhibition pieces reach an ‘ultimate

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point of vacuousness and insignificance of images’ – and one could point also to his work, a pure, disembodied outline of head and shoulders, in The Village Voice (19 February, 1970) – it is important to realise that Raysse is doing two things simultaneously: 1. pushing to their extreme limits the propositions of his Hygiène de la Vision; 2. laying before us the intrinsic nature – its void and its critical meditatableness – of any image: the trap it can lay, and the liberation the mind’s active engagement with it can offer. In 1992, interviewed in Le Monde, Raysse tells us – he is thinking of works of the period above all, of L’Enfance de Bacchus and Le Carnaval à Périgueux, but it is an observation, I believe, we may think fully applicable to all of his visiondriven oeuvre – that ‘all these images have a deep meaning’. This, of course, does not imply some simple equation. When Lascault contemplates the Loco Bello tempera paintings, he find himself hard-pressed to even describe them, so swarming and imbricated are the images they offer, and, in consequence, their implicitness. Meaning, for the conscious artist, is everywhere, has its deep impact on the psyche,7 ever speaking of its shimmering relativities as of its wealth of virtual pertinency. Not long ago Didier Ottinger wrote that, ‘with an intenseness unlike any other, Martial Raysse’s art crystallises what is at stake in a whole epoch’. What is at stake, of course, during and at the close of a century – indeed at the late dawn of another – of murderous warfare, religious and ideological tensions, global amplification of material desire, uncertainties as to personal and collective ontology, is the question of value, purpose and meaning. Martial Raysse’s work never ceases to tackle such issues and encourages their conceivable resolution. Perhaps the principal, most fundamental choice made by Raysse may be said to be his conscious decision to value, and seek to realise in his life and reflect in his work, personal happiness. Though this may seem to be a straightforward choice, it is not one commonly adhered to: either one argues it cannot be a principal objective, or one feels it to be overly egotistical, thus culpabilising self in harmony with those accusations that tend to be levelled at joy, out of envy or a sense of happiness’ irresponsibility. The work of the 1960’s, though shot 7

The ‘function of painting, Raysse can tell us in an interview with Philippe Dagen, is to intervene in individual psyches’ (Le Monde, 9 août, 1992).


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through with Raysse’s understanding of life’s, and art’s, very possible emptinesses and delusions, yet already powerfully draws on the available buoyancies, effervescences and exhilarations in life and artistic gesture. Lascault properly speaks of Raysse’s plain refusal of the tragical, and if, in 1971, in Zoom, Raysse himself is low-key but unambiguous in declaring that ‘my aim is very simple. It is to seek happiness’, Jouffroy takes very high ground in arguing that this happiness, for Raysse, had to be ‘worthy of Saint-Just’. In effect, Raysse understands his aim, his choice, to be a ‘reasoned optimism’ in the face of pessimism’s temptation: a kind of volonté joyeuse in Buddhist terms, or a form, as all vigorous activity may be, of self-therapy, as he will see it in conversation with Otto Hahn – an argument often put forward to speak of the logic of art or writing: one thinks of Niki de Saint Phalle or Louise Bourgeois, for example. The charming 1965 sculpture (of metal, plexiglass, neon and bulbs), with its neon arrow guiding the way through the bright red heart, is clearly an offering, to self and to others, of feasible, creatable, indeed freshly created upliftment. And later, via the twelve exquisite, relatively small (20.5 x 26.5 cm) drawings of Un Jardin au bord de la lune, Raysse will tell us that such works are given to the viewer with the precise aim of ‘returning something of the happiness I received’ (in the years lived by the banks of the Marne river – scene of great transformation for a Frenchman, indeed). As Semin has nicely put it, art-as-happiness becomes a very real, if rare ‘kind of manifesto’.8 The value or purpose Raysse may be said endlessly to espouse in his art, and serenely demand of those who contemplate it with him, is, furthermore, as we have observed, intimately rooted in thought, a deep sense of the essential thinkableness of the plastic gesture. More precisely, this implies, for Raysse, a questing after personal truth. Véronique Dabin sees the Spelunca series as the ‘result of a long spiritual search’, and if Didier Semin concurs in suggesting that such works imply a ‘desire to return to the origins of knowledge’, a deci-

8 Renoir is, too, largely, and exceptionally, an artist of joy. Fluxus, equally, has significant elements of an exuberance yet no doubt somewhat more complex. Poussin’s evocation of art’s ‘delectation’ tends to evoke rather art’s arising aesthetic jouissance, but, despite Reverdy’s firm distinction between privileged aesthetic emotion and art’s abandonment of raw emotion, fusing seems implacable if one seeks it.

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sion to ‘reflect on doctrines’, as Raysse himself says in Les Lettres in 1971 – if one cannot disagree with such arguments, I should go further in maintaining that the entirety of Raysse’s work, ever predicated on an ever becoming meditative envisioning of the relation of self and self’s art to the world, constitutes one long, vast mental-sentimental search – just as André du Bouchet’s entire oeuvre the poet saw as a single (self-)exploratory sentence. Thinking through ‘origins’ – Buddha, Christ, Western and Eastern ontological traditions – certainly; but, too, contemplating the meaning of scrap metal, Prisunic consumer items, the shimmer of photographic images, art’s traversal of all this and much more, none of this must be sidelined in appreciating what a thinking quest for ‘spiritual’ knowledge and truth is. The Hygiène de la Vision works are just as significant as Loco Bello or Un Jardin au bord de la lune or Giotto renversé par un porc or again the 2007 Heureux rivages9 in our appreciation of Raysse’s declaration that ‘great painting [...] always speaks of the path of knowledge and universal love’: intellectual, rational illumination, but, it is important to understand in ‘reading’ Raysse’s work, an illumination beyond mere demonstrable logic: instinctual, impulsively sensed, of the spirit and not just the mind. The intelligibility we have seen Raysse endlessly urge upon art can, thus, take on a manifest sociopolitical aura – Vuillard’s ‘ruin’ stems from his lack of ‘political structure’, we are told – and the city, with its heteroclitic groupings, its complex collectivity, clearly preoccupies Raysse despite his rustic, private proclivities. But intelligibility never implies for him the replacement of the obscure with the transparent. ‘The aim of painting, he emphasises, is to grasp in a palpable manner a reality beyond the material’. Clearly, the task is greater than the metopas accompanying his Sol et Colombe sculpture would suggest: Le Carnaval à Périgueux or L’Enfance de Bacchus or La Folie Antoine point to this tension between the immaterial, complex thought, vision, sentiment, spirituality, and the palpable. To ‘bear witness’, as Raysse likes to see his work doing – he admires Delacroix’s Lutte avec l’ange in the Église St. Sulpice for such a logic of intense effort of revelation of complex thought, personal truth or knowledge – is to move simply towards such palpableness, to invite self and other to contemplate, to commit in the templum of mind-spirit to an act-with 9

With its echoing of ‘bacchanalian’ virtues and earlier specific paintings such as Raysse’s Bacchus appropriated from Da Vinci (cf, infra).


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(cum), the intricate contents of such witness. Broadly speaking, one could say that such purpose, and the meaning capable of emerging from it, is of the order of that poeticity Cocteau saw in Martial Raysse’s work from the outset and that, for all his willing upon Raysse of a socialist programme, Alain Jouffroy comes also to recognise as determining. It is, despite the power in Raysse of what Julia Kristeva, after Lacan, calls the ‘symbolic’, the deep residual energy of the ‘semiotic’ merging with the symbolic that gives the latter its teeming evocative originality. In effect, although both the early work of Raysse, from the Étalage de Prisunic and like pieces down to Spelunca, Loco Bello and even, very much even, the many Bacchus paintings, may vary considerably in the nature of their vision, all contain marked utopian elements. These may be rationally channelled as with Sol et Colombe and, above all, its inscribed metopas, or equally pertinently, the Fontaine de la Place du Marché, where the firmly felt and consciously adopted ancient greek ‘virtues’ of adiaphoria and arete are prominently articulated. But if, here, the symbolic shows its power of coherency and rational modelling, numerous are the works that ride upon the ‘semiotic’. The sheer multitudinous hybridity, the gathering into a place of oneness of the heterogeneous, the scruffy, the ‘suspect’, and the conceivably ‘decent’, even possibly ‘exemplary’, that works such as Le Carnaval à Périgueux, L’Enfance de Bacchus or La Folie Antoine varyingly operate – such implicit psychic energies and the swirling spiritual propositions they may be said flickeringly to convey have about them something of that ethics of assent – ‘devotion’, Rimbaud called it – to the bizarreness of all incarnation, its ‘heroicalness’ as Hugo saw it in the flowing ‘legend of the centuries’. What I am terming utopian in Raysse thus spawns an embrace of the diverse, the macabre and the luminous, a deferral of the logics of the latter in an inclusiveness whereby, as Alain Jouffroy has suggested, others may be figured in all their ‘strangeness, [perhaps] their solitary abandonment, their [improbable] dignity’10 – a potential and even already real human and cosmic harmony whose rational structure escapes us, but which we may yet sense.

10

My parenthesis.

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The Bacchus myth, revisited with that wonderfully refreshing, relaxed, almost nonchalant Rayssian touch that ensures its distinct contemporary rethought relevance, may be seen to constitute a high point of synthesis of Martial Raysse’s aesthetic and, above all, ethicospiritual vision and value. ‘A sleight of hand for a very beautiful story’, he calls it: like all thought, the myth of Bacchus is mobile, available, far richer than its congealed historicity would grant it. As Gilbert Lascault has written, for Raysse there is ‘no twilight of the gods’ and, of course, the symbol of wine and bread Raysse has explored contains within it the seeds of celebrations far beyond the Christian, a hybrid revelling in the hybrid itself, in the innocent joyousness and true, deep wondrousness of matter, of body, of mind, of spirit. Works such as Le Salut soit sur la Dame si sage (1998) or Ainsi voici du coeur l’étrange parure (1999), the 2006 distemper and graphite Étude turque or the Re mon cher maître, the latter two with their grinning glance once more to Ingres, or, again, the largish 2008 bronze statue, D’une flèche mon coeur percé, with its mirrors and white gold leaf, or the 2009 mixed media painting-cum-sculpture La Surface des eaux – all, in their different ways, ‘reach out, as Raysse has written, to what previously was called poetry, ie a moment one feels one is truly living’. Living, that is, at once sensually and spiritually (: ever in the widest sense attributable to this term), conscious too of the sheer materiality of one’s gesture, its ever rearing remakeableness, the ever available conceptual and symbolic jouissance of its poiein. If this is said of his work on that delightful, luxuriating, pro-foundly celebratory cinema Raysse has given us, it might just as easily be said of, say, the paintings of La Petite Maison or his post-Poussin and post-Leonardo ‘bacchanalia’ – Raysse’s appropriation of the Bacchus loosely attributed to Leonardo da Vinci is particularly well adapted to his own mongrel, supple and serious-cum-ludic ontology in that the sixteenth-century original was first titled John the Baptist before, much later, being overpainted as a Bacchus.11 ‘Showing what I love’, Raysse has equally written to describe the purpose of his plastic gesture. And, indeed, it is no small thing to paint with such an intention; in fact, I should go so far as to say that it is a very great thing, and relatively rare, for, though not sa11

The title of Raysse’s work is Le Bacchus de Sainte Terre. It is a portrayal, indeed a self-portrait, one feels, that Raysse gleefully recycles in various paintings, such as the 1996 Proverbes 9-2, as well as the very recent Heureux rivages.


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botaging critical sociopolitical vision and thought, it leaps through the latter to a mode of being and functioning beyond, where, in the very midst of existential contrast art may conjure up, not mere acquiescence, passive tolerance, but a smile of blessing, an accord of joy. Heureux rivages and other recent paintings such as the 2007 Poissons d’avril or the 2008 Oui chéri beam forth the energy of such a smiling and vigorous assent to such at once feasible and dreamed blissfulness – despite any yet imaginable trailing pique or strickenness life may engender. The 300 x 400 cm Heureux rivages reveals an art and an existence bathed in the privacy of consciousness and the free exhilaration of free togetherness. Oui chéri offers the mirror of love’s old and sweetly strange toying, the never fathomable gaze of the other, of otherness, that art’s ‘vision’, ever newly ‘hygienic’, ever tracks and meditates. In ease and puzzlement simultaneously. That art can opt for a practice and an interrogation of the quirky tricks both life and art itself ceaselessly discover and deploy may be said to reside at the centre of Martial Raysse’s large acrylic Poissons d’avril: art and life in a dance of mutual ludic but consenting-querying amorous embrace.

THE ENDLESS IMPRINTING OF BEING: CHRISTIAN JACCARD It may seem, when we look at the early work of Christian Jaccard, his Empreintes polychromes d’adhésifs (1969-70), for example, or the 1972 Toile paquetée, empreintes de ficelage, that we are at an untraversable distance from Piero della Francesca’s Virgin and Child enthroned with four Angels, from Rubens’ Jardin d’amour, even Niki de Saint Phalle’s Jardin du Tarot or Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Pocket size Tlingit Coffin. Surely, we may feel and argue, some mere imprints of bits of string, even if carefully woven and knotted, or, yet more improbably, pieces of tape, surely such seeming minima cannot be conceived of in some continuity and affinity with works of visible human presence and relationship, or others representing some extensive creative effort, albeit quirkily elusive, strange, fanciful and defiant of our impulse to rationally categorise. As I shall seek to show, however, it is from such beginnings, visceral, fundamental, authentic, largely selfdoubting, that the powerful and original oeuvre we know today, the ever radically ontologically exploratory gestures that constitute it, have slowly but surely emerged – albeit in the midst of the curious jouissance of their anxiety. Jaccard’s is an oeuvre of intimately fused repetition and renewal, obsession and discovery.1 It becomes, we may think, fetishistic in its teemingly proliferative démarche and production. Its imprints, trace markings, knottings and burnings are caught up in a seemingly implacable movement of making, unmaking and quasi-Pongian remaking. Resurrection vies with, reveals itself in a sense as synonymous with, death, destruction. If Jaccard’s art is one of process, a tinkering process of bricolage, instinctive, inquisitive, a doing-in-order-tosee, without determinable eschatology, the process may be said to draw its power from a doing that equates to the self’s very being. Not that Jaccard’s art is narcissistic, but it remains ever at that neurotic, energetic centre of the self’s engagement with the very strange and

1

See Selected Bibliography. No personal website exists, but much is viewable online.

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remarkable core of what is, in principle anything that is, its emergence, its remanence, its transmutative disappearance. In as long ago as 1958 Jaccard makes his very first empreintes of plants and animal life, his first exhibition coming four years later. From 1964 to 1976 he works in an art print establishment, during which time he will both, instinctually, unconsciously even, lay the groundwork for everything that will come, and produce a vast number of imprints and knot-works that will not be revealed to the public before 1973, with an exhibition of knots in London, then Sao Paolo, followed by a 1976 exhibition of empreintes involving insects, plants, small animals, paper, ribbons, cloths, strings, knot-‘tools’ and so on – even burned, buried, fermented and resurrected shroud canvases. The empreinte, in effect, will remain the essential artistic mode of exploration of the world for Christian Jaccard, right down to the fire works still pursuing today their relentless fascinations and probings. The imprint is, of course, a trace, an archiving, of the earth’s contents and its own, inherent processes of self-elaboration. It speaks of barely conceivable equations of being and seeming flirtations with non-being, an exchange of matter and energy leading us to think through the fragile terminology of creation and destruction. The empreinte is the ‘dead’, but still extant face of beingness. A silent mystery play whose surface features speak wordlessly of the deep unsaidness of our earthly onticity. A persisting presence offering to our minds the joined agendas of loss and fullness – a kind of ‘presentification’, as Claude Simon might have said, of absence, residue, trans-figuration: a shifting of the images of being – and a vicarious living of the processes of such shifting trans-figuration, a living, as Achille Benito Oliva has written, of the image’s, the trace image’s, ‘capacity for ideation’. Thus is it that earlier works such as the 1971 Toile jaune décolorée (with its fused offering of imprinted canvas and the knot-‘tool’ with which imprinting comes about), or the 1973 Couple toile/outil échelle (acrylic, ink, hemp, canvas, 280 x 95 cm), or yet again the 1973 even larger, exquisite blue and white-flecked vertical canvas Toile calcinée, with its burned white wick horizontal markings or ‘imprints’ – all such works entail a ritualistic exploration of what we may think of as the primordiality of matter, the latter’s inner, perhaps unconscious, selfelaboration, sensed in turn, via the artist’s own swirling, barely articulatable consciousness, to carry and display deep, ancient, residual

The Endless Imprinting of Being: Christian Jaccard

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forces of all beingness. A theatre of ephemerality and evolution stages itself in these varying modes of the empreinte – of being’s imprints, ever shifting, infinitely renewed in their micro-specificities where time and space, ‘indissociable’ Berthet argues, play out through the neurosis of Jaccard himself. The empreinte marks out – via an art of ‘painting’ that, Jaccard himself maintains, escapes from the history of painting, refounding not just its modes perhaps, but, too, its agendas, its purposes – the primacy, and primalness, of physical gesture, the geste – the song, the dance, the poetry – of physicality. But it is a marking that masks its subtext, the ‘logic’, any ‘logic’, we may presume to feel or argue underpins and authorises it. This, precisely, is the ‘capacity for ideation’, for mythification, contemplation, theorisation, that Oliva, along with Jaccard himself, feels the empreinte can generate – whether of insect or string or fire, anything, in fact, implicitly. The empreinte thus lays before us the vestigial product of the strange equations of time and space, a palimpsest-like product of ancient processes of being and doing enacted here and now, as ever for our pleasure, our wonderment, our perhaps anxious awe. From the outset, knotting has accompanied Jaccard’s imprinting activities, a first exhibition coming in 1962, and, from the standpoint of its relation to painting, the artist is acutely aware that the ‘logic’ of canvas and that of the fibres of string and rope remain intimately fused – differently enacted, but inseparable, and this not only in the use of knots as painting and imprinting tools or the simultaneous deployment of knot-imprints and the knot-tools used on canvas itself. Jaccard’s 365 outils he speaks of as representing ‘365 days of anxietyoppression, delight-affirmation’, and, in 1979, some six years following the London-Sao Paolo exhibitions, he gives us, at the Galerie d’Art Contemporain de Montpellier, no less than 729 knot-tools in 9 series of 81 graphited hemp ropelets – a mathematics whose implicit diverse symbolics Jaccard explains, fascinated, to Bernard Noël. Elements of such a massive and subsequently continued ‘collection’ – for Jaccard does not have the initial aim of composing a structure, but finds himself engaged in gathering and preserving the strange, impulsively produced products of his pseudo-neurotic process of doing, ‘passing time’, as Beckett would say – can be seen, however, not in any way to slavishly adhere to such mathematics: Suite de 4 outils noués (1971-72), with its jute and soaked sisal, Couple toile-outils

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(1974), a large diptych of inked linen and impregnated hemp (210 x 123 cm + 192 x 120 cm), or the 1983-86 Suite de 25 objets couronnés, with its use of iron stem, wood, hemp, sisal, rubber, jute, polypropylene and graphite – works such as these show, over a long period of years, the ever mutating nature of knotting’s fabrication and deployment, its ‘applications’ and its modes of gathering. Jaccard’s knots can stand alone or in groups; they may proliferate within their individual forms, ‘suddenly’ sprouting ‘crowns’ via some visceral desire to effect efflorescence, a kind of visible rhizomaticity; they may be grafted one onto the other, or may soar on âmes, their iron ‘souls’ – what a lovely notion! – that allow even further self-adventure and ascensional selfexpansion; they will always be – despite Jaccard’s initial ‘shame’ over them – plunged into resin or graphite to render them rigid, and preserve them; and such preservation may take the (extreme) form of placing them in boxes, coffins, ‘precious jewels’, yes, as Noël called them, but dead dolls too, speaking of Jaccard’s hauntedness, his ever present meditation on time and mortality. We may, of course, be tempted to see in such activity a form of modern arte povera, as well as the kind of ‘primitivism’ Alfred Pacquement discerns in a gesture of considerable ancientness, one, however, whose practicality has disappeared, mutating into that nonutilitarianism spinning about on its axis which obsessiveness tends to imply – but which is, no doubt, at the centre of all artistic gesture searching for, and perhaps finding, within itself, purpose, value, a ‘use’ needing radical ontological rethinking. Furthermore, Jaccard’s knotting, products of a ‘nomadic hand’, as Oliva writes, a hand ever shifting in its tensionality of repetitivity and never-sameness – such knot-works, whilst seemingly ascetic, the austere exercising of the hermitic, as the Greeks saw things, yet betray this bare minimality both in their massive pluralness and in the kind of ‘violence’ Michaud and Noël both remark upon in the laborious and physically demanding production of what is finally offered in its delicate stillness. What meaning, if any, can we then ascribe to the hundreds and hundreds of knottings Jaccard finally agrees to give us, after thinking long and hard as to whether he, in fact, should do so? Knot-works are not signed, or, better, we may deem them to be self-signing, somewhat like Claude Viallat’s painted canvases whose (a)signature lies in a form ‘evacuating’ authorialship yet offering identity and signings ar-


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guably beyond signification. Thus may we hold such works to be simulacra, images parodying semblances, signs without a face, pointing nowhere – merely and manicly to themselves. Works as non-sense, though underpinned by whatever meaning and value we may give to insistence, blind, uncertain continuity, a doing plunged into the deep night of itself – and self’s beingness. The ritualistic dimension of Jaccard’s knot-works it is important to think through.2 Doing of this order cannot, though no definitive name may be put on it, be deemed nihilist, wanton, (self)-destructive – notions occasionally surfacing when speaking of either Jaccard’s knotworks or his art of fire to which we shall soon give our attention. All doing, as Jaccard himself senses in regard of his own gestures, whether imprints of insects or knotting or burnings, along with their respective imprintings, may be held to be a ‘religious’ phenomenon: reverence for and honouring of what is, however ‘minimal’; a ‘binding together’ (religare) of scraps of an existence, via doing; a faithfulness to being’s strangeness, as well as to the capacity of self to sing the lyrical song (however lowly, ‘poorly’) of self and all that is other (: insects, rope, etc., etc.). And all of this, as Jaccard tells us, via some blind but instinctively obstinate day by day ‘conviction’ of its pertinence, its deep vital connectedness to an improbable divinity of self and world that their coming together in this way strangely seals. So that, if we are inclined to see works such as the 1976-79 Objet greffé et suite de 9 outils or the 1984-85 Objet couronné, with its characteristic constituents of iron, wood, hemp, jute and graphite, and, of course, any empreinte made via knotted works become ‘tools’, as abstractions due to their seeming self-reflexive non-representational quality, we yet must bear in mind that, though beyond ‘anecdotalness’ and ‘all figuration’, as Noël and Pacquement respectively have argued, such works may be said to ‘represent’ in two other critical ways: 1: they speak of matter’s primacy, they depict, chronicle and stand as icons of matter’s pure and caressable materiality beyond our capacity to fathom and characterise its ‘logic’;

2

There are interesting passages in Mircea Eliade’s writing on knots, and Salah Stétié’s entire work thinks through the logic of knottedness.

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2: they speak too, and, once again, figure, picture and recount, without explanation, sensing the latter’s radical unfeasibleness, the doing, the faire, the poiein available to the person prepared to assume them, become an artist – and, via this doing, render tangible the artist’s being, his or her being-inthe-world, present to the world’s matter – its stunning materialness and its profound matteringness, if I may put it that way.3 Thus do works, such as Objet couronné or Couple toileoutils lay before us a double image, silently eloquent, discreetly lyrical, but never neutral, detached, remote, of an ontology of an uncertain self engaged dynamically with its equally uncertain others. Jaccard’s desire to move beyond painting’s felt ‘incapacity’, to experience some ‘flash and magicalness’, as he tells us in 1990 – a flash and magicalness no doubt most fully lived in his working with fire – already reveals and represents itself, I should maintain, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s with the empreintes and noeuds that soon will proliferate. Anthropology and materiology fuse via an ontological search that the pursuit, the study and the meditation of fire will only deepen and complexify, but the die is already cast and, as with Mallarmé, its resultant mathematics will defy neat and stable, reposeful equations. The logic, if we may call it that, underpinning the fire and burning that lie at the centre of Christian Jaccard’s work from the early 1970’s on, is, perhaps inevitably, in significant part a logic of language and emotion, philosophy and psychology, theory and visceral instinct. And, of course, it remains intimately interwoven with the logics already expounded of the empreinte and the noeud, in themselves hovering about that hyperhybrid space of the strictly physical and the mythical, the materio-metaphysical and the affective. If the application and use of fire would seem to go back into the deep recesses of human history, where we can presume at once its practical exploitation – heating, illumination, protection, desired modification of elements of the immediate world – and its relative sanctification, the ritu-

3

Reverdy’s insistence on art’s necessary refusal of ‘anecdotality’ can thus be seen to be ‘subverted’ in the ‘neo-representational’ manners I describe and which Jaccard’s art in particular bring to the fore.


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alistic exploitation of its revered mysterious and mystical power, it is to philosophers such as Heraclitus or the Chinese concept of Wu Xing that we owe the binary yet synthesised logic of destruction and transmutation, annihilation and energetic exchange that still today informs our broad conceptualisation of fire as a primordial ‘element’ and an agent of fused impermanence and strange continuity. Jaccard’s practice of the art of fire is, in effect, far from flatly and banally aesthetic, and his writings and interviews demonstrate a deep meditation of the yet nearly inscrutable implications of fire, its myths, its magicalness, its terror and its sobering exhilarations. He is, of course, alert to the work of other sometime artists of fire: Yves Klein, for example, who, in 1957, applied firecrackers to canvas at the opening of an exhibition of his work, and who, in the last years of his brief life, burned pigments onto paper (Colour fire Fc3) and set fire to water-sprinkled paper (Fire F271), fascinated as he, too, was with the enigmas of void and purification esoterically implicit at the heart of seeming degradation and erasure. And there was Alberto Burri, who, during this same period, could tear up his work, burn it and reconstitute it via collaging, or else give us his 1958 Combustione plastica or his 1964 works such as Grande rosso P18 or Rosso plastica, where molten and burnt plastics revealed, arguably, something of their material instrinsicalness at the same time as they inevitably evoked the ‘cleansing fires’ pouring down on a wartime Milan Burri memorialised in other dramatic artistic manners. Whilst other artists Jaccard recognises as having varying degrees of influence on his own démarche – from Duchamp with his radical and off-handed (self-)liberations and Dubuffet with his systematic refusal of art’s cultural conditioning, to Piero Manzoni with his Achrone works of the late 1950’s, Rauschenberg and his neo-Dada Combines, and, of course, so-called primitive and anonymous art in general – the philosophical and even the psychological roots of Jaccard’s sense of fire may be said to lie in the Heraclitean equations of ongoing change via destruction and creation, elegant equations of relationality and circular exchange as conceived via Wu Xing, though more theatrically dramatised by Bachelard, in his Psychanalyse du feu, as the tensional struggle between the paradisiacal and the infernal, the luminous and the tormenting. Alain Duault, in his text for the 2009 Livres et leporelli, speaks of the many faces of what Oliva calls Jaccard’s ‘glorious fire’, and there is little doubt that the artist’s fascination has grown and multiplied exponentially since his very early burn-

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ing, burying and final exhumation of material and his later visit to Caserte, Naples, where he gazed into the incandescent abyss of the volcanic magma. But let us look more closely at some examples of Jaccard’s plastic adventures in the art of fire. In 1973 he offers various Toiles calcinées, of different dimensions: the considerable and beautiful blue and white-flecked vertical canvas (390 x 101 cm) with its burned white wick horizontal markings giving an effect as delicate as Monet’s water lilies, a piece Suzanne Pagé describes as ‘involv[ing] great control and the aleatory, mastery and pure empiricism, mortiferous destruction and epiphanic revelation of unforeseen chromatic and material splendours’;4 or the piece of lesser but still significant dimensions (173 x 119 cm), with its trace or empreinte, residual imprint, of the disappeared white wick object upon a red acrylic canvas – a drama as aesthetic as it is ontic, ontological.5 The 1975 Toile brûlée, empreinte polychrome clearly emphasises Jaccard’s understanding of fire’s residualness as a process and state of imprinting whereby discoloration provides new spontaneous aesthetic effects at the same time as the at times completely burnt-through canvas in the vertical axis and the tattered remnants and loose bits of acrylic powerfully ‘narrate’ the equations of deterioration, ‘nothingness’ and transmutation we have mentioned above. The Trophées or Cuirs calcinés of the late 1970’s pursue such at once material and meditative explorations. One thinks of the 1977 Grand Trophée (282 x 240 cm) with its white wick burnt hide offering an intensification of our livable sense of destruction by fire, a radicalisation of the experience of animal (and human) sacrifice, exploitation even, this, naturally, in tense ‘harmony’ with the purely aesthetic dimension of the work’s plasticity. Similar unstated agendas of irony, contrast, anxiety-pleasure are articulated in the stark realism of Jaccard’s 1978 Grand Trophée du scorpion, another dramatically and, naturally, impressively large incinerated 4

The question of the aleatory is, of course, complex, and in the ‘poetics’ of Jaccard may be said to be deconstructed inasmuch as burning matter may be said ever to unfold, rather, the intrinsic, unrandom, though unforeseeable ‘logic’ of matter-in-certainconditions. 5 I use the term ‘ontic’ to evoke the raw, intrinsic phenomenon of beingness, whereas ‘ontological’ may be said to refer to all discourse that may be directed towards the unnameableness of beingness, ontos, fundamental ‘onticity’.


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hide (255 x 255 cm). With reference to another 1978 piece, Assemblage Nabuc – but it is a commentary pertinent to all of these works involving burned skin – Gérard-Georges Lemaire speaks of a ‘projection into the sphere of fetishism and unutterable outrage’ of fragments of hide/skin – with all of the discourse attachable to them, though left for the viewer to generate according to his or her private ethics or spiritual ontology. The 1980’s see many further developments whereby fire continues to be used simultaneously as a tool and the subject of art conceived of as permitting a contemplation of both the physical surface and the symbolic mystery of incarnatedness. Take the various Papiers calcinés and Combustions sur papier that are experimented in the 1980-84 period, for example. What we see are works of varying size (from, say, 137 x 120 cm to works as small as 50 x 65 cm), all deploying white wicks in endlessly new patterns and in combination with the use of a wide range of other materials such as pencil, talc, pastel, graphite, chalk, offering a panoply of effect to tease the mind and the senses, aesthetically, viscerally and ‘metaphysically’. Lemaire does not see such work – quite rightly, to my mind – as some ‘pure negation of the artistic gesture’, nor as some sort of ‘metaphorical holocaust’. But, if there remains here a chromatic fascination via the use of multiply selected or treated papers – waxed, greasy, dull, dark, white, thick, standard –, ever present, indeed indelible, beyond the relative innocence of burning paper, are yet the fused preoccupations of fire’s induced angst and trauma, and the curious, irresistible sense of a cosmic and mystical alchemy endlessly enactable. The 1982 Papiers cible, with their black or white wick burnings on white paper, thus offer stunning plastic formations, sensuous, rich, aesthetically pleasurable, but, too, they provide a site for the staging and spontaneous revelation of the hidden mathematics of being, the secret structures of its enigmatic alterity. And Bernard Ceysson goes so far, writing of the Grand Papier d’Arches X (1988), as still to see in such fire-on-paper works a firm echo of the Trophées, an echo of the tensions not just of order and seeming disorder, but of beauty and horror, simplicity and profound disturbance. These years show Jaccard engaged in a number of other plastic adventures not perhaps so much ambiguous as diverse and interwoven in their philosophical, aesthetic and psychological motivations and underpinnings. Take, this time, the 1980 Anonyme cal-

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ciné, one amongst others involving the burning of white wicks on unattributed oil paintings: art now becomes the obliteration of art – but at the same time its conservation as trace of its seeming iconoclastic obliteration. Shall we privilege, then, some principle of absolute iconoclasm when an archived trace of the original remains? Can we be sensibly even tempted to think that there is some elitist destruction of (a certain) art’s ordinariness, mediocrity, ‘forgettableness’, when, in effect, Jaccard’s oeuvre as a whole reveals hesitation as to its own initial and even ongoing value – as well as, here, a hesitation over his own iconoclasm, in keeping open a tiny window onto the destroyed. Is there, then, irony, self-mutilation, in Jacccard’s unspoken plasticoontological equation, or is this a fleeting gesture against all representation of the beingness of self and other – an illumination of the anonymousness, the unnameableness of all beingness? In fact, Jaccard will even turn topsy-turvy our belief in some wild and aggressive iconoclasm, arguing in 1991 that the anonymous, of art (and being, no doubt), is drawn into the light, from the dark void, by, rather, a caressive gesture of ‘iconolatry’ far beyond any idea of sacrilege, profanation. And, lest we may attribute some angry destructive sentiment to the various 1982 white or black wick firings of postcards of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger or Goya’s La Maja desnuda, or the 1980 incendiary action applied to assembled postcards of Bacchus et la Nymphe au bord de la fontaine, let us heed the only apparent paradox of Jaccard’s statement made to Dominique Berthet in a 1998 interview: ‘Any work of fire is first of all consciousness of fire and desire for fire, in other words desire for love’. This understood, Jaccard’s many commentators resist only with difficulty the idea of what Daniel Abadie, with reference to the dramatically potent Pièces blanches brûlées of the 1982-84 period, terms Jaccard’s ‘iconoclastic mania’. In effect, fire cremates, drastically reduces, stirs our anxieties over a lurking conceivable nothingness at the centre of being; yet it does this at the same time as its light exhilarates, reveals a dazzling alterity, points to the mystery of transmutation, and, of course, allows entry into the ever unforeseeable, seemingly capricious realm of new plastic intrigue. The Pièces blanches brûlées can attain to vast proportions (390 x 590 cm). Their white wick burnings upon raw, unprocessed canvas offer a neo-painting of incinerated, scarred landscape, a neo-landscape the earth endlessly


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deploys but which art now reveals for the first time. These pieces are true fire paintings, their forms half-orchestrated, half-dreamt, their actuality laid bare before us via a blazing pandemonium only witnessed by Jaccard himself. Great swathes of brandings, fiery gougings and lesions blacken canvases sometimes treated with acrylic paint that ripples, furrows, streams about certain half-calculations (circles, crosses, etc.) ever overtaken by that intrinsic and secret mathematics also on display, remarkably illuminated in relatively smaller works of the Papier cible series. The Rouge émis (1985-86) works, like the six Burnt Cut Ups (1986), whilst manifesting these same latter tensions of plastic design and astonished submission to the inherent art of matter’s spontaneous generations and transfigurations, unfold upon a paper or canvas backcloth of striking reds. The effects are varied in the formal contrivance of the Burnt Cut Ups and entail the use of black wicks, adhesive tape, acrylic paint on different papers (vélin, Rives, Arches, Japon, Bristol, Gaufré) of different shapes and sizes (largely modest, but never miniature: 65 x 50 cm, 76 x 60 cm, 83 x 73 cm, etc.). The Rouge émis works are distinctly bigger (195 x 130 cm, 200 x 200 cm, for example), and can range from the exquisite black smokiness of white wick burning on rectangular acrylic canvas, to sharper geometric black and white wick scarrings on a circular red acrylic canvas. Such creations mutate in the 1986-88 period into the works such as the huge Tondo Rouge émis, combustion (382 x 405 cm), where, once more, one feels that Jaccard’s fire painting has found a delicate balance, via an assumption of radically new aesthetic means, between beauty and disquiet, sublimeness and awed trepidation, inventive concertation and assent to the explosive, seemingly anarchic inherency of the earth’s elements in interaction. Wonderful 1988 works such as the Mandorle rouge buissonnoeud, combustion show Christian Jaccard pushing ever further his penetration into the dazzling and yet formidable realm of fire art: great smoky black clouds billow up on large red acrylic mandorla-shaped canvases (284 x 206 cm, or 174 x 127 cm) set abaze via black wicks, the language employed by Jaccard to describe them revealing at once his sense of the mystical or at least symbolic overlapping of the human and the divine in enclosing almond-like form (mandorla) and the necessity of resorting to neologisms (buissonnoeud: bushknot) to evoke the indescribable, the unnameable – a burn-

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ing bushknot that hints at Jaccard’s consciousness of the sacred forces of being ever gathering, ever self-releasing. The fire painting most spectularly haunting and evocative of the ineffable, is the 1988 Rouge orangé buissonnoeud, craquelé, combustion, a large (200 x 170 cm) black wick and (orange) acrylic on canvas, filled with a stunning trace image – a revelation and a mask (imago) – of cosmic energies freely at play, yet accompanied by the artist, in all the sumptuous splendour, all their awesome soberingness. From the late 1980’s on Christian Jaccard’s work adds another string to a bow we may have thought already fully assembled: the concept supranodal. Made of an iron frame covered in ribbons of curled and balled cotton hardened by an ever startling red acrylic coating, Portique haut, concept supranodal (1988) returns Jaccard to the realm of a newly conceived type of knotting, this time constituting a more manifestly sculptural form (: the earlier knotworks may, of course, attain to sculptured form, but are largely miniaturised until the âme, the inner supportive frame, is adopted). Portique haut (233 x 180 x 55 cm) offers the quirkiest and most gangly of porticos and bears resemblance to a skinny, almost bodiless and certainly headless animal with two legs seemingly padding along in pseudo-motion. If Giacometti and even Niki de Saint Phalle come to mind, Portique haut clearly stakes out its own aesthetic and modal territory. Portique bas, concept supranodal (1988) confirms this double radical break, as Jaccard himself sees it, with ‘sculpture’s evolution’: the supranodal concept, he tells us in 1998, ‘invents, through excrescence and arborescence, a rebirth of utopian forms that art only knows how to bring about’. Portique bas is a large (250 x 60 cm) single bobbly red acrylic supranodal tower balancing on one balled foot, its top attached to the ceiling, and accompanied by an immediately adjacent supranodal pseudo-football – any portico effect being achieved solely by the space created between the column and the wall. Utopian art, yes; for the work’s non-utilitarian aspect, its phantasmagoricalness (which is not simply play, but exploration), its ironic and perhaps smiling pseudo-figurativeness – all invites disbelief in art’s mimesis and, rather, a revelling in a pleasurableness that the art of fire tends to offer, as we have seen, only with constraint, a degree of fretfulness and anxiety. These red lacquered works – further early pieces include Cylindre, concept supranodal (1987-88) and various Cadres (1990) – Jaccard


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insistently sees both as corresponding with research in quantum physics and molecular biology, and as escaping the trap of seeing art, though it may be said to engage with truth and existence’s enigmas, as a gesture offering encodable answers in the face, precisely, of being’s slipperiness and ineffableness. Joppolo suggests that the power of the supranodal lies in its departure from what we may view as the ‘quotidian’ – a cylinder, a picture frame –, and its leap into the realm of the ‘biomorphic’, reality’s at once chemical and alchemical ‘alternativeness’. Art, then – we may think of other supranodal creations, either with red acrylic coating such as the large and wonderful half-tree, half-animal Concept supranodal of 1989 (225 cm high, 310 cm wide), with its flailing arms/branches, or the white acrylic ensemble of 199193, White camera, concept supranodal, where bed, table, desk and picture frame inhabit in eerie and ghostly and entirely non-functional fashion a bare sunlit room, or, again, the various Carrés BRN of 198990, with their burnings upon red acrylic-coated wood – art, then, as study, interrogation of matter’s strange becomings, its seemingly unruly chaoticalness that yet hides some blinding mathematico-physical orchestration. For Jaccard’s art, in these works, as everywhere, reveals a fascination with the promethean, being’s capacity for transfiguration, conversion of its ‘images’ and masks, for matter’s (and consciousness’) rhizomaticity, its secret branchings, multiplications, its exchangings. His art, whether it involve empreinte or knotwork, burning or supranodal concept, never ceases to tackle questions of being and doing, via that ‘conviction’ we have heard him speak of, which is patience, persistence, a blind trust in being’s fearful astonishments, the sense that, as he tells us, contemporary art (and life, no doubt) may be in crisis, but it is a ‘crisis which is essentially positive’, for the ‘destabilising’ and the ‘uncomprehended’ act as spurs, ‘sow[ing] doubt, discomfort, [but, too,] pleasure’ – the sheer, strange pleasure of being and doing in a seeming context of loss, void, even devastation – but a context whose other face is creation, beauty, astonishment, and a fullness of alterity. Meaning and value, then, do not come prepackaged, definitively articulated: they may emerge, if, as Yves Bonnefoy writes, ‘we will’, and from the very maw – be it fire, the imprinted relic of an insect, the endless gesture of knotting, etc. – of art’s process – which becomes, thus, a process of living. Oliva

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notes that Jaccard saw ‘poetry’ – a lyrical song of beingness – in gazing upon a damp stain on the wall. Such poetry, as that of the 1972 Couple toile contrepliée/outil tressé (with its delicate chromatics and graceful geometry), of the 1980 Anonyme calciné 19e siècle (with the naked beauty of a young woman standing amidst the fire all about), or of the 1989 Diamant zinc BRN (showing the spontaneous ‘metapictorial’ [Jaccard] effect of an orchestrated burning on an oxydised zinc support) – such poetry provides no rationally sustainable argument for its meaning. It offers qualities and a plastic-ontic reality not readily amenable to critical language, which as Lebahar suggests, tends to bounce back off such reality. The preoccupations with cosmic expansion, entropy, the ‘hidden realities’ of being, as Jaccard writes, that fire in particular suggests to the mind, such preoccupations certainly underpin the art that concerns us here. But it is the ‘desire to do, to make’, and the ‘externalising’ of that desire, that ultimately count, conjure meaning and value from that which would seem to defy their conjuring. Cosmic energy without matching human energy would just leave Jaccard, as it might have left Mallarmé, faced with an ‘eloquent, [but] abyssal, [desperately] declamatory whiteness of paper’, canvas, etc. It takes ‘love’, ‘iconolatry’, desire, to move from negation to affirmation, from what is to what can be, from blockage, frustration, impotence, to a poetic reclaiming, participation, that ‘consubstantiation’ with the given that Reverdy deems the highest motivation and accomplishment of all art.6 The 1983 tree-like Concept supranodal or the exquisite 9 modules zinc BRN, polyptyque (1991) (with the latter’s nine modular burnings on granular zinc, all attached to a unifying wooden support, on which nine golden arcs with their smoky trailings are silhouetted against grey-blue metal) allow us to read such ‘unpainting’, as a writing of the self’s being – its ‘scripture’, we might even call it, after Gérard-Georges Lemaire’s expression –, into the elements of cosmic matter and energy. Primitive scenes and utopias glimpsed through art’s prismatic transfigurings; unnameable sacredness snatched from destruction, the ‘profaneness’ of time’s seeming deaths; the sublime eked out from the everyday and the terrifying; eros and agapè shining their flickering light on cosmic darkness and its implacable machi6

See, for example, Reverdy’s En vrac (Monaco, 1956).


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nery. Certainly, Jaccard’s 1972 Suite de 22 outils et entrelacs, his 1980-81 series of Combustions sur papier, his Mobilier VIII, concept supranodal, are anticanonical, transgressive; certainly we may agree with him that ‘my conception of painting is one of deconstruction’; certainly Joppolo is not at all wrong to argue that Jaccard’s oeuvre globally reveals a ‘fundamental search for pure forms and signs’, a ‘shortcircuiting of representation’, as Bernard Ceysson argues. But this agenda that moves from what we may think of as the anecdotal to some articulation of the universal, cannot be thought as a primarily aesthetic agenda, though art’s poiein, its tireless making and remaking, dominate the space of exhibition. The flow of primordial energies, within the self and within the phenomena of the world, the investigation, the scrutiny, the experience and the meditation of such energies in the production of what Mallarmé termed ‘some third aspect fusible and bright’, a third, intermediary energy, this, I should maintain is what, at bottom, drives Jaccard’s gesture. If, then, this intermediary energy is art itself, it remains that it is not deployed and explored for its narcissistic prestige: far from evacuating the world to establish some transcendent art for art’s sake, art’s gesture is ontological, concerned with the logic, the logos, of the matter-energy of being, its simultaneously frighteningly banal, even ‘disastrous’, yet divine, sacred depths, unfathomable though experiencable. The ash, the bituminous trace juices, the decomposition provoked by fire, these are never ends, finalities; rather are they the processes at the heart of all beingness’ inner exchange. Jaccard’s agenda is thus vast, implicitly infinite, beyond words, beyond rationally solvable equations, and it moves and flows at that intersection of forces seemingly unreconcilable yet ever reconciled by the mystery of being itself. Christian Jaccard’s work, of the late 1990’s through to 2010, continues to pursue this intrinsically complex and rich agenda, offering both major retrospectives such as the 1998 Empreintes, Dessins et Objets in Osaka, covering the entire span of his production since 1972, or the 2002 exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux de Fonds, En noir et blanc, an exhibition centred on very recent creativity and preoccupations from 1993-2000. Much new exploration continues, however, and there are various important writings which are currently being collated so as to appear by 2011. There is the most interesting 2002 exhibition in Roubaix, Confrontation, where Jac-

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card’s work is ‘read’ in relation to a painting by the Dutch artist, George Hendrik Breitner, Moonlight/Clair de lune, a ‘confrontation’ – of separate but affinitary human energies, energies too of consciousness of time – that will be highlighted at the Musée d’Orsay in 2008 when the exhibition is taken up again with Jaccard’s large (204 x 279 cm x 2) and very beautiful ‘confrontational’–complementary diptych titled Minuit – Minuit écart, with its use of thermal combustion gel on the support offering the most subtle and fluidly imbricated greys and whites and blacks of being’s emerged intrinsicalness. As a White Dream is the name Jaccard confers on an impressive supranodal concept ensemble exhibited in 2003 at Marseille’s Chapelle de la Vieille Charité. ‘Dream, the artist tells us, is a binding theme of my work. I have had forever a recurring dream: I am in a vast abyss of white clouds feeling oppressed’. The ensemble of hauntingly white acrylictreated knot-ribboned antisculptures – Jaccard argues that sculpture involves removal of matter, whereas the supranodal structures add, multiply, proliferate, and are ‘objects’, simply – reveals bed, chair, tree, birdcage on pedestal, walking stick, wheelbarrow, garden implements, etc., creations that speak of ‘my turpitudes, my phantasms, my dreams’ with all their domestic banality, fused with bizarre white supranodal transfiguration of the quotidian. Their logic retreats into their very beingness, their madeness: quite simply, as Bernard Muntaner writes, ‘THEY ARE’. They are, in and via the ‘energies’ that have made them the world’s, Jaccard’s own, and that now inhabit them – ‘meta-physically’, one might say, echoing Gilbert Lascault’s observation, for such energies are characterised essentially by what Jaccard terms an ‘inner flux’ art can only capture in stilled, congealed symbolic manner. Les Dormeurs (2003) also rings certain changes, taking four photographs whose filmed burning constitutes a live ‘scenario’ speaking of the inherency of energy’s unforeseeable but programmable ‘performance’. ‘Whatever it is, Jaccard tells us in an interview for Arts Thèmes, the thing looked at forever changes our view of the world.’ But it is a view that, in Christian Jaccard’s case, whilst producing and being mediated by images, ever remains a moving site of meditation, deep contemplative reflection upon the seen and the unseen, events and their traces, yes, but endlessly subjected to an ontological surmising that, like all didascalic musing, becomes an integral


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part of the radiant space of the plastic work proper.7 The four photographs of Les Dormeurs thus find themselves fatally – wonderfully, richly, as proliferatively as Jaccard’s supranodal concept creations – immersed in the fullness, the entirety of the artist’s teeming comments and exchanges devoted to his own plastic processes and productions. To gaze upon them is, indeed, to expose oneself to a radical shift in one’s complete – but ever provisional – Weltanschauung. The energeia the photographs of human figures being reduced to ash give off is an ‘activity’, an ‘operation’, an ‘actualisation’ or ‘effecting’ that plunges ever back into Jaccard’s swarming ‘logics’ of the imprint, the knot, combustion, the supranodal, but ever forward, too, into specificities-lived-and-meditated-now. We realize this, equally, as we admire the extraordinary 2006-2008 exhibition Christian Jaccard mounts in the Chapelle de la Trinité in Bieuzy, the tiny village of Brittany, this in the context of the remarkable innovative Art dans les Chapelles programme. Proliferative, hieratic, serene and yet disquieting in its implacable raising up before us of the innumerable trace images transformed via their situatedness into sacred pseudo-icons of the ephemeral, the transfigurative, the ineffable, Jaccard’s vast poietic creation at once invites the deepest and most sober of articulations of the forces it releases and, at the same time, stills and silences, plunging us into an avowal of awe, half jubilant, half affeared. For, we come to sense better ever, here, in a place given over to contemplation of the very mystery of incarnation and the suddenness of its disappearance, the full power and yet the tense residual question of the significance of raw createdness, art’s most certainly, but, forever beyond though through art, that of our strange, wondrous and perhaps terrifying beingness whose imprints abound and multiply and speak of an enigma in the face of which only agnosis allows some fullness of knowing. An art ‘placing being before itself’, as Georges Bataille has written, a gesture and its relation to our ontos that Jean-Paul Michel has

7

Derrida is most eloquent on this point when speaking of Gérard Titus-Carmel in his Cartouches, centred on the Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. Bonnefoy’s idea of such radiance goes further, as his Le Grand Espace, translated as, precisely, The Radiant Space (see Selected Bibliography), makes wonderfully clear.

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recently further meditated8 as does Christian Jaccard here and throughout his compelling and original oeuvre.

8

See Jean-Paul Michel’s ‘Placer l’être en face de lui-même’/‘Placing Being before itself’ (Editions VVV, 2010).

DESIRE AND DECEPTION, THE METONYMIES OF ARTIFICE: JOËL KERMARREC To look upon any selection of works by Joël Kermarrec is at once to be stunned into admiration for the silky, seductive smoothness of their execution, the simultaneously oneiric and, one feels, fantastically quirky provocativeness of their contents allied to their titles, and equally, though we may be tempted to burst into multifarious response to what we see, to be hushed and ushered irresistibly back into the strange silences they powerfully emit. The early untitled oils on canvas Kermarrec: Als ik kan reproduces for us simply defy description.1 The 1969 Fond rose, a similarly fairly large (130 x 130 cm) acrylic and oil on canvas, offers us tantalising forms – erasers? Choc-olates?, liquid ribbons of blue – floating, free, sparse, perfectly ‘there’, popartish even, we might feel, in a most subtly shaded sea of pink. A 1976-77 oil on canvas (190 x 190 cm), superbly titled Le Sourire de l’ange et le petit trou par où on voit la mer, plunges us into a nearerased creamy space with its faintly lingering angelic smile and a tiny blue ‘peephole’, but, too, its rough patch and cornered oblong of blackness, its small brushed and brilliant rainbow-like throwaway suspended curve, a couple of other minimal markings and a miniature of what will become Kermarrec’s trademark ampersands, tucked away to the side, almost missable. And, taking somewhat more recent work such as the 1984-85 Pavé d’Ostende (157.5 x 136.5 cm) or the 1996 oil on canvas, Torse, peinture charogne à la figure impossible (150 x 136 cm), we find ourselves confronted with, and hypnotically drawn into, respectively, a large speckled white background surrounding a thinly drawn not quite perfect red circle with its tiny gateway and inside it, scattered, at times their visibility ebbing, yet situated with the sureness of one who has ‘seen’ them and ‘knows’ them, two floating, riveting eyes, various E’s, one crossed through, a floating-fadingsleeping face, another, bearded, ancient, gazing upon the explodedgathered scene, two smallish square mazes, one with its colours run1

See Selected Bibliography. A personal website is available: www.joelkermarrec.com.

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ning and streaming beyond the circle, a couple of handwritten and impossibly pallid lines, another rainbow-like, but this time excrementally brown tuft, an apple in its faint polygon, and some tiny greyish nippled shape; and, in the case of Torse, peinture charogne à la figure impossible, our task of description nears, as Kermarrec’s title suggests, the impossible: a vibrant purplish-blue background, fading to black, contains a large white-outlined space with its indescribably seething blackish form flecked with pink elements, a yellow streak, a blue skeletal hand, while, outside this closed (or lassoed, captured and featured) space, we observe a reddish-orange comet-like form crossed out in white, another pale but luminous blue skeletal hand, a yellowwhite square, a tiny pink and a small yet green tuft, and three minute red circles containing blobby ampersand-like forms. It is not surprising that critical response to works such as these is marked by wonderment and dismay, recognition of a brilliantly variegated technical mastery as well as a rare capacity to convey something of a swarming and complex consciousness, and a sense of relative impotence in coming to grips, conceptually, intellectually, with what Kermarrec’s art ceaselessly serves up. Denis Roche sees in the teeming painted forms of this virtuoso artist ‘the luxuriant hillsides of no-man’s-land’. Philippe Cyroulnik can insist upon that ‘brilliance of disenchantment’ we may feel we can perceive in the exquisitely subtle, even esoteric, ever shifting allusiveness of ghostly faces, eyes, smiles, letterings, conveyed seemingly by the merest touches and formings, now barely perceptible, now vibrantly hued. Frédéric Valabrègue similarly has urged us to see the ‘sumptuousness’ of Kermarrec’s painted ‘tinselly rags’, whilst simultaneously understanding full well just how disconcerting and even impossibly challenging the viewer may find them. As Yves Michaud has argued, we are faced with an oeuvre, and each of its individual works, that ‘provokes commentary but immediately deflects it’. Henri-Claude Cousseau, writing in the catalogue to the 2007-8 exhibition Ardoises, petits papiers &..., maintains that Kermarrec’s ‘world is secret, elliptical, sketched, elusive, but peopled and agitated with signs and fragments, luminous deepnesses, that gleamingly constellate a space whose silence is undeniably the bearer of a long-meditated obscurity and opaqueness’. Filter into the equations of such broad appraisals the oddities generated by Kermarrec’s painting and drawing on old school slates, on small open

Desire and Deception, the Metonymies of Artifice: Joël Kermarrec

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paintboxes, his multimedia use of collaging, photo transfer, the endless cycling in and recycling of what Derrida would term remainders, leftovers, chutes and déchets, the incorporation of ‘accidents of the day’ – a dead fly, a feather – ‘gadgets’, ‘instruments of transition’ (ladders, pointers, etc.) that are and are not part of a given painting ‘against’ which they are placed – when such elements are factored into an appreciation of an art at once aesthetically rebellious and wittily yet seriously existentially self-searching, no wonder a critic such as Yves Michaud can speak of a disturbing, slippery enigmaticalness, and even an apparently ‘endless production of senselessness’ – a statement he, as all of Kermarrec’s critics, will seek gingerly to controvert to the extent that a profound underlying urgency is ever known to be at play in Kermarrec’s extraordinary plastic gesture. To speak of the latter, in effect, is not simple. Kermarrec himself would go further: ‘to write “on” painting, he tells us in his published notebooks, Le Fil dans la toile, comes down to trampling on it’. Visibleness is what art offers, he will maintain, not ‘legibleness’. The real space of painting is flat, material, scrutinisable yet inscrutable, while words hung upon it are ‘unspace’ – and if we may turn this statement on its head by deeming all art, language, poetry and plastic creation, as what Bernard Noël or Jacques Dupin or, again, Gérard Titus-Carmel term non-lieu, ‘unspace’,2 we should understand equally that Kermarrec is, of course, thoroughly conscious of art’s representational impotence. Both his own writings and his plastic signings he perfectly well appreciates as not leading to knowledge in any stable satisfactory way. As for criticism, ‘ignorance’ always risks staring it in the face. The logic is elementary: ‘hors peint puisque dit’, he wastes no time affirming: saying is to step outside of the painted. The two 1964 oils I recalled at the outset of the chapter are a perfect illustration of (his) painting’s ineffableness, for any ekphrastic gesture is doomed, no matter how earnest, to leave the realm proper of the plastic form it purports to represent. The 1990-92 oil, Aphasie, a 110 x 110 cm square standing on one of its corners, may seem to provide via its title a way into its functioning and meaning, but this is a leurre, a deceptive trap, for its strict paintedness persists in defying such an entry, 2 See, for example, Dupin’s’ ‘Le soleil substitué’ in Dehors (Gallimard, 1975) or Titus-Carmel’s Jungle (non-lieu) (VVV Editions, 2005).

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leaving us on the cusp of pure surmising. The ‘stupor’ Kermarrec may be living and the ‘fiction’, as he also puts it, that art breeds in the face of the real and which language can only tautologically confirm, end up being shared by artist and viewer: the space of the painting, drawing, sculpture, etc., although Kermarrec feels it to be crucially ‘initiatory’, yet is one of a residual unknowing, a strangely seen and lived unspeakableness. Just as an Yves Bonnefoy, rereading his Hier régnant désert, may confess to its enigmaticalness, so will Kermarrec recognise the unreadableness of his own work. This does not mean that works such as the 1995-96 Mon tablier, Véronique, Mélancolie (with its fetish of a painted stick complicating the at once dour and brilliant canvas) or the fabulously affabulating 1985-86 Akeïropoiete, le visage du roi éclaté par l’art au soleil couchant avec l’aube (with its broken black circle upon white, its appearing-disappearing face, its blue skeletal hand imprints, its ampersand and its other undefinable microforms) lack aesthetic justesse; on the contrary their ‘orchestration’ and ‘finish’ seem impeccable. Kermarrec is that artist who ‘dreams up for himself, as he encourages himself to do, a para-saidness’ – a para-dit, as he wittily and, given his melancholia, punchily, writes. Such a pseudo-paradise, however, as Jacques Sojcher perceptively remarks, offers us the message of its secrecy. As the title of the 2007 exhibition Bruissements d’Ostende hints, the ‘logic’ of works such as those just mentioned or the 1995 Ontbijtjes or the utterly strange Attente, 999 fois découpée pour le dessin, never achieves articulation other than via their intrinsicalness. At best, they offer a murmuring, a whispering of their dense implicitness. In effect, I should argue that Joël Kermarrec’s most fundamental mode, the most persistent mode of his doing, his poiein, is, as perhaps with all truly fine artists, that of questioning and searching. Not his, simple resolution and definition, quick settling of accounts and equations of easy adequation. To dig into one’s presence to self and the world, thereby to query and search, may not offer finalities, for always ‘all remains to be sought’; but at least such (self-) ‘excavation’ allows a certain form of ‘living’, as he tells us. The various fairly large oil paintings of the late 1970’s titled Fond rouge are not to be thought of as aesthetic experiments, easy formalist or abstractionist creations dominated by chromatic or geometric theory, or some banal refusal of representational art. They bear witness to a searching ‘even


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in darkness’, a posing of questions never – and troublingly so – ‘shareable’. As with the extraordinary Quatre vivants of 1983-84, an ensemble of four largish oils (160 x 130 cm), we certainly enter a world of exceptional chromatic and formal virtuosity, of rare beauty, in fact; but such criteria do not take centre stage in an art tussling with inner darkness and hauntedness – ‘in the game of the four corners, Kermarrec will remark in connection with his Quatre vivants, a dead man in the middle’. The sheer ‘mobility’, as Valabrègue writes, of such works, their exquisite unstabilisableness, means that the pure plasticity to which Kermarrec’s ongoing searching has given rise, is their meaning. The questioning that emerges within and via their visibility is their meaning. Yes, Quatre vivants, like other works, and via its four ‘subtitles’, Homme, Boeuf, Lion, Aigle, proffers implicit, infinitely spinnable micronarrations, but, as with the Fond rouge paintings, or even the 1980-81 Ana – Portrait à la règle bleue or Ana – Portrait à l’homme de dos, all of our psychologising, autobiographising, even our simple ekphrasis, cannot, indeed, must not, blind us to that so easily erasable ‘plenitude of [art’s] surface and constitutive [plastic] elements’. Camille Debrabant is perfectly right to urge us never to undervalue the meditative character of Kermarrec’s oeuvre, its narrative weft. Equally, yet, must we never give up our sense of the deep occulting silence that bathes this same oeuvre, a half-smiling, half-anxious sleight-of-hand by which painting ever withdraws with its left hand what it may seem to offer with one finger, or perhaps occasionally two, of its right hand. The teasing enigmaticalness of a work such as the 1996 Rose d’Ispahan pour ma tendre (with its hairy phallic form touched by some bright pink curlicue, its white-flecked greyish square tilted onto one of its angles and trailing in its orbit tiny white and pink speckles and other microforms, its two blue footprints, its tiny white streak with an accompanying ampersand, all silhouetted against a dark nightblue fond) or, say, the 1980 Mes demoiselles Alice (with its two ever so faintly drawn standing female nudes, its phantom chair, its set of clenched teeth caught in some hairy blue triangle that drips and runs, a smaller brilliant yellow and orange form utterly indescribable yet with its vibrant orange-red ampersand, a queen of hearts card hovering high in the top right corner, adjacent to a few unreadable faint handwritten words, all emerging from/disappearing into a large creamily nuanced

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canvas) – such enigmaticalness may be said to constitute the unsayable ‘saidness’ of their plasticity, signs that ever reopen what we may think, describing them, is their fixity, their arrested closedness. Kermarrec speaks of the play of such ‘opposites’ as (his) art’s ‘breathing’ – a respiration without clear utterance, a communication of an ambiguity, an undecidableness, an unrecordableness at the heart of (his) art’s flashing, blinking signifiers and signifieds. Obsession is everywhere in Kermarrec, whether it be in the Ardoises or the Boîtes, the 1991 set of small paintings suggestively – we have here the ‘eroticism’ of eating, teeth, mouths, breakfasting, etc. – titled Dame Tartine, or the 1995 set of Écrans de lassitude, or, again, the photographs or paintings of La Dame à la cape, or else the quirky funny fetishistic table-legs and slates simply titled for a special occasion Canne-tête & ardoise (1994). But, if obsessiveness produces ensembles, grouped paintings or sculptures – Kermarrec does not see such work as serial, but rather as a continuous tussling with compelling and shifting signs –, dismemberment and dispersal, corrosion and erasure are simultaneously staged via such gatherings. Thus is it that fragmentation and continuity coalesce. Thus is it that mutation does not deny a certain form of coherency and totality. The disparate, the heteroclitic within a given painting does not, cannot, refute a strange harmonisation of constituent plastic elements. The kind of ‘signifying errancy’ Cyroulnik sees Kermarrec’s work as performing via its continual coq-à-l’âne becomes bizarrely synonymous with an aesthetics – and an ontology, too – that flees exclusion in its (Rimbaldian) ‘seeing’ of connection, of reciprocally ‘contaminating’ – Kermarrec’s preferred term – and finally displayed epiphanic constellation of fragmented signs. The reiterative but ever morphing manners of Joël Kermarrec’s work – take any of the ensembles just mentioned and examine them both internally and from ensemble to ensemble – indeed constitute, as Frédéric Valabrègue has excellently suggested, an ‘erotics’ of form: a constant reworking of desire, a material-psychic revisitation of the beloved. I shall return to this shortly in a broader context of motivation and purpose; suffice it to emphasise here the erogenous nature of all reiteration. What, however briefly, are the tactics of obsessional reiteration and mutation of Kermarrec’s seeming ‘cabinet of curiosities’? We can point here to the anhistoricity of a work such as, say, Lune et


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ombre portée (1983), its preference for the errant, the multiple, the liberated. This, of course, entails an erasure of the tracks of one’s emotional and mental journeying, a rendering ‘hieroglyphic’, untranslatable the language of autobiography – even assuming such a language were available in terms other than the oblique, the indirect. The ‘anagram’ paintings such as the 1996 Torse, peinture charogne à la perspective de l’Inconstanza or the 2005-7 Dessin de l’été, l’épars réuni, rire, le calme est sur son erre, or, say, the 1983 Songe de Sartre en 1942 – such anagrammatical compositions do not simply turn back to front the articulation of their ‘terms’ and ‘declarations’, they push their ‘letters’ (gramma) up and down, squeezing A into forms – ‘anagraphs’ might be a more appropriate term – that now look like Y or Z, analogous forms, but understanding the full implications of ana- (with its pure echo of a-: ana-logical & a-logical). Such anagrammaticality is an integral part of the joined tactics of collage and brouillage,3 a confusing (con-fusing), a muddling, but also a seamless melding, of the seemingly disparate. The 1976-77 oil on canvas, plus object, La Bonne Face de la Sainte-Victoire, le poids de la peinture, la gravitation universelle demonstrates such a tactic in a (con-)fusing, an enigmatic compacting of the elements of a title that, try as we may, we cannot find to coincide rationally with the parallel con-fusion the painting’s plasticity equally lays before us. Torse Yorric et Je (1982), a squared oil poised on one of its right angles, similarly melds, inseparably and with splendid bafflement, the exquisitely unidentifiable components of its picturality and the fused, unpunctuated terms of a title both defying its adherence to such picturality and irrefutably enacting it. Just as there is, for the viewer, no reliable, stabilisable mode of decoding works by Joël Kermarrec, so does Kermarrec, at once making some sort of relatively exuberant peace with this fact and yet understanding with soberness that it is a fact born of the unavailability of codes adequate to his own deep expressive needs, boldy elect to rely upon such shaky, fragile encodings his imagination can produce. Yves Michaud is right to see here an audacious and original move, for it is a tactic leaving the painter’s work precariously balanced on the knife-edge of brilliantly rich communication and stymied exchange. The various Bâtard de chamane works Kermarrec of3 Such brouillage, Kermarrec has maintained, with shrewdness, ‘sharpens up reflection’.

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fers us, for example, push artist and viewer to the limits of their semiotic and hermeneutic capacities, where sorcery and divining, therapy and release are ever at stake, where hiddenness and revelation act out their uncertainties, where some indefinable logos beyond rational reductions and platitudes – truly ana-/a- , yet vaguely intuitable – may come to function. This, moreover, despite – in effect, precisely because of – its ‘bastardisation’, its ‘illegitimacy’, its hybrid impurities. Art, like a pain bâtard: fantastical, though digestible, even delicious. Two other tactics may be reasonably identified in the gesture of Joël Kermarrec. Tactics curiously paradoxical, conflictual even, though inevitably fused: aphorism and metonymy. Take a work such as Mon pantalon, of which, complicatingly but characteristically, two ‘versions’ exist, both 1972, both canvases plus object, a gold-painted pair of trousers, both 200 x 160 cm. Whilst one night-blue canvas shows only a faint trace of trousers through a red-lined grill (pattern), accentuating rather numerous curious blotches of white (occasionally humanoid or animal-like), a long oblong box or block of wood, and, above the barely perceptible trousers imprint, some form vaguely resembling a spool of sorts; the second night-blue canvas reveals two strong imprints of trousers, other forms being more scattered and arguably less foregrounded, though with echoes of those of the first painting.4 Aphorism lies here in the utterly terse definition the title pretends to provide of the painting’s (with the object that cannot be separated from it) capacity of representation. Of course, such pithy (self-)definition, supposedly settling once and for all questions pertaining to content, signification, purpose even, is delightfully tonguein-cheek: the aphoristic formulation leads us to a no greater resolution of the deep pertinence of Kermarrec’s two works. It is almost as if Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe were being restaged. Even if these trousers were Kermarrec’s, his title is tantamount to saying, all at once, a stone is a stone, painting is painting, ceci n’est pas mon pantalon. Truth, definition, representation are stood on their head, rendered derisory, unfeasible, irrelevant: aphorism is always pseudo-aphoristic, false, ludic. Z will never be A; just its smiling – and, at times, anguishing – dreamy simulacrum. All of Kermarrec’s art articulates such 4

Of course, in painting, foregrounding is but pure illusion: every form has equal ‘presence’. Kermarrec’s work in particular thrusts such equivalence upon us.


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statements as to their truth and definableness. Other fine examples I should point to, where, too, the title is instrumental, are the 1990-99, Jezabel, paume figure, le mensonge de la peinture, le mot perdu and Dame, eau, vent, cendre, rien: the language of the designation of the ‘truth in painting’ – one thinks of Derrida5 –, of necessity lost in its own labyrinths, spinning its own sagas of meaning, standing before the alluring indeterminacies of painting’s unlanguagebleness – but one that titles such as these toy with, lovingly, desperately. What I am calling the tactic of metonymy may arguably be seen to intersect with that of (pseudo)aphorism in Kermarrec’s démarche. Naming, via language or plastic form: we have already seen the problematics of such an act. To add to this ‘phenomenon’ the quality of meta – betweenness, withness, afterness, laterness, beyondness – is to render clear that both language and art are, precisely, in relation to raw realness and lividness, metaphenomena; this, moreover, in addition to the fact that each is the metaphenomenon of the other: language to the side of art, art to the side of language. No coincidence anywhere, unless one accepts the significance – as we surely do, despite its relativity, its ‘mere relationality’ – of the swirling tautological universe that language (: titles, commentary, theory, Kermarrec’s, mine) and art (: its forms, images, simulacra, masks, illusions), each separately though ‘virtually’, potentially, notionally in conjunction, deploy and invent. Take, for example, the 2002-4 Ontbijtje & ..., a circular oil on canvas (120 cm diameter), a world, a universe in itself, with its floating table-like form upon which we see (the illusion of) a bowl of milk and, perched impossibly on the pseudo-table’s edge, a knife, and, endless pink- and orange-flecked forms. It is a scene of breakfasting – an important idea/reality for Kermarrec – real, shareable, sacred, mystical and much else, we might maintain, a pseudo-livedness and dream, desire perhaps, but ever meta: parts standing for, to the side of, fatally after and beyond, some undecodable whole. A whole lost, except in its plasticised parts. A naming in plastic forms in the place of any imaginably direct naming via language. Every form a meta-nym, never able to complete naming, even were that possible: the & ..., ampersand and suspension points, reminds us that tropes are never transitive. Perhaps the Sanskrit trabate, thought to be a partial 5

See Selected Bibliography.

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root of tropos, and implying shame (for improper naming), may give us a further tonality via which to meditate Kermarrec’s art. One further example, the recent and delightfully titled square oil on canvas, Titre à venir-voir-ineffable (à l’oreille rouge) (2004-6), will allow us to make a final point in respect of Kermarrec’s metonymic strategising. Against a slightly mottled black pseudo-background (: all is twodimensional, of course), we perceive a small vermilion-red (presumably ear-like), shape, with a tiny green tuft at its base, a long beautifully multicoloured and slightly twisted pointer-like pen[cil?] with the vaguest of long cast shadows as well as a sharp, very short shadow. At the painting’s near-centre a tiny, but characteristic bright comet-like form orbited by three purple-blue circular dabs whose presence is echoed by a thin blue stick-like form jutting into (as it were) the bottom left black oil-space. As Kermarrec‘s title suggests (twice), we are, here, really beyond language, nameableness. Any naming would be meta. And, too, all plastic form remains meta. This said, metonymy tends to offer us a name/form that, without further naming, refers us to B or C or Z, to which it is intimately related and where we can presume such intimacy of relationship. Titre à venir plunges into an almost pure seeing (voir) of this intimacy, even though the latter cannot be worded. The oreille rouge doesn’t take us far, doesn’t close the gap opened by meta; but each metonymic fragment (: red ear?, pen(cil)?, shadows, pseudocomet, black pseudobackcloth, etc.) of the global metonym (: the entire painting), like the global metonym (and its action or process: metonymy) – all point to an intimacy of relationship between livedness and art. Metonymy may articulate via a sideways movement, an evasion, an elusion, a speaking-and-forming-asotherness, but it yet offers the nearest form of inner absoluteness despite its radical alterity. Which leads us to the question of a thematic content in Kermarrec’s oeuvre, one we may feel it absurdly impossible to formulate, yet one critics such as Yves Michaud and Camille Debrabant, but others too, argue is far from being beyond our grasp. Michaud suggests, quite reasonably, that an ‘obsessive, endlessly broken and relaunched thematic narrative is easily recognisable: power, capture, will to know, to see and possess, the haunting obsession with losing’; and he adds: ‘unless it isn’t also a haunting obsession with not being able to lose, not being able to forget – the fact, quite simply, of being obsessed’.


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All of this, of course, as Michaud rightly insists, constituting a mirror of ‘our own obsessions over possession, seduction and abandonment, tenderness and hatred, obsessedness and nightmare’. Naturally, one could without problem expand Michaud’s broad list: uncertainty, ambiguity, ‘vanity’, disappointment, derision, tragicomicalness, the ‘failure’ of both representation and livedness – the dispersal and fragmentation ever at work despite art’s transmutations and life’s pleasures. Still, to look at a work such as the 1996-98 Torse, Peinture, Charogne à la tache jaune de l’indécision does not readily reveal indecisiveness, let alone any decaying carcass: painting, yes, brilliant, vibrant, wonderfully and strangely inventive; but no manifest visual traces of what elements of the title suggest: transmutation is a superb success, a marvellous oneiric plastic facelift. The 2004-6 diptych, Les deux mondes, two exquisite circular oils (120 cm diameter): a work such as this defies all thematic analysis, assuming via its beautifully delicate and nuanced chromatics the full purity of a plasticity determined either momentarily to transcend doubt and anguish or to sing with full aesthetic voice those instants of high upliftment and oneiric vision Kermarrec ever remains magnificently capable of laying before us via his chromatic and formal distillations. Cousseau is right to speak of this art as the strangest of ‘encyclopedic utopias’, a ‘wonderland’ often belying any melancholia and mourning that may underpin it. When we gaze upon the teeming signs the Ardoises generate, the elegantly discreet, ever shifting, but aesthetically coherent ensemble of small (19 x 14 cm) works titled Als ik kan: modèle et rêve (1992), or, again, the 2004 mixed technique on paper, Des petits riens que je raconte – but, truly, any work would do – we can appreciate that we have here an artist understanding the complexity of the psyche, its swirling contents, its situatedness with respect to the ‘real’, the ‘model’ and yet its endless capacity for ‘transcendence’ of the latter, a dreaming and free meditation beyond them, beyond the grip of their flagrancy. Art as self-portraiture, but showing, ever recreating the secret and infinite face(s) of selfness – and knowing, as Kermarrec indeed knows, that all such faces ‘lead [the observer – both self and other] straight to his or her own physicalness and surreptitiously to his or her history’. Art as a place/non-place, a symbolic, obliquely articulated figuration of that Reverdian dream of ‘consubstantiation’ of self and world, a reversal of the equation of loss and disempowerment to which self may have seemed fated to succumb. If the recurrence of skulls, disconcerting

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terms in certain titles, ironies of all kinds, indeed disturb the logic of such reversal and, as Philippe Cyroulnik suggests, ‘a joyful vanity [yet] wears the colours of melancholy’, Kermarrec’s self-portraiture remains committed to a dream of art, one as visible in, say, his powerful 1961 Indian ink on paper Nu féminin assis or his remarkable 1969 mixed technique Sans titre works, as in the 1981 diptych (drawing and collage on paper) Petite cosmogonie – mots disloqués – le chiffre et l’intercesseur or else the 1994 ever revamped, ever hypnotically riveting mixed technique on paper Ontbijtje. A dream steeped in obsessive thoughts and emotions, but pushing far beyond into the realm of ‘that emotion called poetry’.6 But what, then, can we say with regard to the purpose of art, when Kermarrec seems prepared to shut down all manoeuvrability in denying art all ‘transcendental or psychological justification’. There are a number of important points to be raised here, and I shall proceed compactly: 1: Kermarrec recognises that doing can be understood and lived as a relative ‘end’ – its endlessness being deemable as a ‘construction despite all’: works such as the untitled, but annotated Doel-me/la Hache de Lessines & la tentation de demander à AD où se trouve le Doelme de la mélancolie (1993) – ably discussed by Camille Debrabant with respect to their figures de style – show that, precisely despite powerfully implicit raw emotions (death, mourning, melancholia), the act, the gesturality, the pure and gritty doing of art, its driving, ongoing poiein can eke out something where nothingness appears poised to prevail; 2: the question of purpose can be recontextualised if art can be truly seen to elude the claims of truth, reality, representation viewed conventionally: artifice, play, what Michel Deguy terms the being-as-or-like, l’être-comme of all figural doing,7 become in this perspective the only truth and reality available: the photographs accompanying Georges-Emmanuel Hourant’s 6

Cf, Pierre Reverdy’s Cette émotion appelée poésie (Flammarion, 1974). See, for example, Deguy’s Actes (Gallimard, 1966) and also my discussion of such matters in Michel Deguy (Rodopi, 1988). 7


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poem in Comme une autre place qui serait la mienne (2003) or the postcards constituting Mauvais sourire et fausse marine (1992-97) thus contain and silently render visible the tense unanchorable ludicity of a purpose folded deep into the cagey, guileful and artificial truth, if I may call it that, of their pure doing; 3: art for Kermarrec may be thought of as generating, as Valabrègue has written, ‘a speculative oeuvre’ – speculative and specular becomes its purposing; its forms prove nothing other than the energy of the gesture that underpins and produces them; such purposing is dubious, precarious, ever on shaky ground, realising itself in a strange distorting-reforming mirror where shapes constitute a (non-)place, a non-lieu, of, yet, intensity, a dogged but brilliant professing of determined nonsurrender and half-smiling, half-resisting unpresumptuousness. The early Sans titre (1966: cat. 25, Étalon préposthume) or, say, the 1990-92 La Jubilation de Jezabel au carré rouge et à l’éventail-ciel testify in very different but utterly complementary ways to such a programme of art pulling itself up by the bootstraps; 4: art – it is Kermarrec himself who recognises it – ‘moving ahead via an “atheological” metaphysics’: art extending its speculation and specularity into the realm of a (hopeless?) questioning of origin and death, and hence of (the purpose of) being itself; a metaphysics teetering on the brink of the esoteric, the abstruse, but caught between the hard, undreaming energies of mockery and implicit angst: lest we think that the painter who can toy with the concept of the divino artista, who can understand that, as Valabrègue suggests, Kermarrec’s is a ‘metaphysics of illusion, of the relativisation of ends’ – lest we think such a painter cannot be taken seriously in metaphysical terms, we should peruse with equal seriousness a painting such as the justly celebrated Rêvant d’être un papillon dans le rêve d’un papillon (1986-87), or else the 1991 ensemble of works titled Pinocchio, au pays de l’éternelle déception des images: profound are the metaphysical implications of works such as these, complexified as they are by attitude and manner;

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5: art, in effect, as what, in Le Fil de la toile, Joël Kermarrec will call ‘an initiatory fiction’: a lure, an artifice, a deception, a shimmering (self-re)invention that finds within its very doing, an unhopeless purposing that, just conceivably, via its self-exploration, may provide some initiation – some entry, some beginning – with regard to the enigmas, both wonders and worries, of self’s being-and-doing-in-the-world: the striking 1993 piece from the Chasse au Mélode, Doel-me & Old mee ensemble (cat. no. 95, Ardoise, petits papiers & ...), with its annotation that serves to title it, & l’ombre, reveals an artist tussling with fundamentals, blackness and whiteness, square and circle, livingness and crucifixion, and the implications of all initiation: the unknown, the shadowiness, the à-venir, the endless supplementarity symbolised by the omnipresent ampersand – which yet does not drown out the energy of art’s ongoing initiatory purposing; 6: if, then, for Kermarrec, art may seem to find an adequate purpose in the ironies and laughter that, indeed, abound in its plastic gestures and can be confirmed in the jottings of Le Fil de la toile over a substantial period of time, we yet need to think through what this implies: does irony necessarily force purpose to spin about, endlessly, on its head? does it always constitute a mindset of sharp, even cutting irreverence? is it even ‘dangerous’, as Kermarrec notes Kierkegaard to be warning us? can it be seen, as Kermarrec perhaps thinks at times, as, quite simply, ‘the moment of questioning’, the necessary consequence of all opening of debate? just how close can irony be to what Kermarrec terms ‘transcendence’? and, to crown it all, does the artist of irony not suggest to us that ‘to have anyone believe in irony is the only irony’? Suffice it to say, for lack of space, that the nature and the purpose of irony, its desirability, its surface seductions and its conceivable dubiousness, are constantly meditated throughout Joël Kermarrec’s writings and his plastic oeuvre, whether it be the 1974-78 ensemble Ce qui a été sera, the 1995 ensemble of small oil on wood ovals, L’Effroi, rien et tout, or the 2004-6 Titre à venir-voir-ineffable (au carré vert) with, this time, its


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pair of mottled yellow ‘ears’ matching the red-ear painting we spoke of above; 7: art, Kermarrec’s, as what Denis Roche has charmingly and perceptively seen as an ‘untimely and festive Nataraja’, a dance of Shiva, a swirling, ironising, multiple, continual erotics of creation whereby derisiveness embraces, falls in ‘love’ with, joy, delight, becomes a kind of orgasmic release allowing death and la petite mort to shed their seeming binarity, generate an always pseudo, artful ‘mysticism’ of the self’s bodily and psychical poiein: what are the extraordinary Boîtes of the late 70’s and early 80’s, the fantastical Bâtard de chamane works, indeed all of the recently gifted works of such astonishing versatility now with the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (and revealed via the 2010 publication of Joël Kermarrec: Étalon pré-posthume) – what, if not this ceaseless, many-limbed and self-exhausting/selfconstituting dance? My final remarks will centre around a few of Kermarrec’s most recent works: the 1999-2005 two-piece oil on canvas La Femme d’Aristote ou le problème XXX et un hommage à la cruche de Bacchus de V; the 2004 Autoportrait métallique, le premier et le troisième; the 2006 Ex frère ‘trilogy’ of tilted oval oils with sometime supplements; the 2002-5 Anekdoton oil on canvas; and the 1989-92 + 2001-3 circular oil, Paume, carré, crâne, le reste. I have not spoken of conceivable influences, affinities and fascinations, literary or plastic, pertinent to the yet powerfully original oeuvre of Kermarrec, preferring to privilege the high specifics of the latter. I shall merely say here, however, for the subject would require very considerably more space than I dispose of, that such interpertinences can range from the understandably most oblique to the clear reference via either written or visual, quotation, from the poetry of René Char, Benjamin Péret, or Francis Ponge, through the writings of Kiekegaard, Gracq, Bataille, Leiris, Blanchot or Caillois, to the art of Magritte, Jasper Johns, Klimt, Klossowski, Ensor, Spillaert and others. It is enough to say that the gamut of fascination is clearly immense – surrealism, spirituality, sacredness, eroticism, ethics, absurdity, ‘disaster’, désoeuvrement, fictionality and ‘lie’ and illusion in art and language, the claims yet of earth, place, the viscerally lived, aesthetic freedom and discipline, and so on – but that its

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traces are almost always implicit as the gesture of Kermarrec imposes its unique markings and developments upon his wide-ranging readings and aesthetic appreciations. If we take, by way of example, the first painting mentioned immediately above, La Femme d’Aristote, we can straightaway comprehend that there can be no question of tracking down any of the above other than in the most intangible of terms. We search in vain for clear plastic echoes of Aristotle’s wife, even if we see in the skeleton an echo of Pythias’ death; and, even if we interpret the painting as a homage to Velasquez’ Feast of Bacchus, otherwise known as The Drunkards, such critical musings remain unstable, uncompletable, and in effect never can supercede the global impact of a plasticity far in excess of strict representationalness. Meaning attributable to some externality flickers, ever falters, scrambles its traces, delights in erasure – whilst at the same time revealing a rich implicitness beyond the flagrantly personal. Meaning, here, may be thought of as open, even infinite orientation (sens), an ever ongoing directionality of thought become chromaticity and form loosely, wittily (and yet seriously, ungratuitously) attached to a few verbal enticements. As with, say, Autoportrait métallique, le premier et le troisième, meaning slips, slides about within the confines and via the modes, most essentially, of pure plasticity. Its circulation does not have an evident end, an absolute horizon in mind, cannot be given one. It is the ‘theory’, the theoria – process, parading – of itself. Part of the endlessness I have spoken of. But if the plasticity of La Femme d’Aristote (: large vertical red ear-like form with embedded feather and its tiny shadow, floating skeletal form, brilliant blue smoky cloud with one of the painting’s three small yellow squares, certain truly indescribable dirtyish forms bottom middle, a very tiny white ring-circle with its minute shadow – and then there is the jug in its own variegated red-orange diamondsquare, with small mottled white square and other tiny forms) and if that of Autoportrait métallique (with its exploded brilliantly multicoloured ‘map’ of some inner secret world only chromatics can convey, its stark black grill overlaying various polygonal [: precisely manysided and closed] fragments floating in the upper right quadrant of this anti-map, its pallid grey face and bust bottom centre, with its partial black ‘shadow’ strangely reminiscent of Kermarrec’s many Dame à la cape, and its large bright red reversed curlicue of a question mark spurting from the grey head, and, in the bottom left corner, a sharpangled black near-square) – if such works can give rise to a kind of


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esotericism, a swirling ‘mean-ing’, a self-contained never-ending circulation of enigmatic ‘interior’ signification, yet do they found their plastic non-lieu, their unspace, only just above the claims of the earth, its daily preoccupations: being and non-being, beauty and death or ‘vanity’-futility-illusion, the self’s psychical complexity, its becoming and its fragmenting, its moments of darkness and those of brilliance. There is, in short, ever present in these paintings, but shimmering to the point of near-imperceptibleness, what Camille Debrabant, speaking of Pinocchio and Hallali pour Doel-me à Lessines and Chasse au Mélode, Doel-me & Old mee, has called a ‘secret logic of assembly’. The three oval oil on canvas works of 2006, each 116 x 89 cm, each titled Ex frère, viewed exclusively from a plastic, visual perspective, reveal nothing of the ‘model’, the raw emotional, psychical, spiritual or other intensities that, presumably, motivate their creation. Modèle, here, as elsewhere, now ludicly and ironically, now with melancholy and gentler meditation, deforms, de-realises, deconstructs, becomes those multiple and at once obscure and yet luminously proffered, those secret and yet densely and desiringly meaningful reformations, transformations, imagos Kermarrec wittily calls mélode, doel-me and old-mee in the works Debrabant examines. Erase the title’s mention of brother (and with it all biographical implicitness) and the Ex frère paintings float back totally into their enigmatic plastic freedom and purity; retain the titles, as we must, and a faintest horizon of raw emotion gleams: it is simultaneously essential, an intrinsic element of a ‘metonymy of desire’ in which the paintings originate, providing their urgency as well as their original plastic intensity, and, let it be said, beauty; but inessential, too: we are now, with the Ex frère works, in the brimming realm of vertiginously transmuted and veiled signification and value. Plasticity is, now, the place of all meaning, surging, vacillating, fading, regenerative, poetic, unfettered, infinite, transfigured. The 2002-4 Anekdoton, a large (150 x 135 cm) oil, presents us with an anecdotalness turned inside out, stripped of its ‘authorialness’, transcendent of the quotidian details (good or bad) of finiteness. Its ‘story’ is, in effect, as ever, the story of chromatics and form, their power, their claims, their dreams, their strange feasibilities. At most – but this remains a considerable achievement – Anekdoton points to the unfathomable, mysterious, even magical, mystical and miraculous fact that anything at all is, and that what is deploys the infinite puzzlements of its storiedness as we live and perceive it. The visualness, the

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‘visibility’ of Anekdoton is not truly amenable to an ekphrasis seeking to go beyond mere (and already extremely difficult) description. We are now, with Anekdoton, or with the beautiful Paume, carré, crâne, le reste, a painting worked on for over fourteen years, in the realm of hermeneutic indeterminacy, an undecidableness and ceaselessly surging interpretive supplementarity. But, of course, value, ontological pertinence, lies in this very fact, just as it lies in a beauty – or, if one prefers, a strangeness –, plastic, aesthetic, poetic. Such value, of Paume, carré, crâne, le reste, let us say, lies in its inarticulatableness, an unspeakableness yet spoken, rendered visually symphonic, metastasised, constellated yet ever mobile. It is a value of ambiguity and clarity fused, deep uncertainty and imagined shownness, beyond category and rational placement. But real, there, created, epiphanic, luminously orange red, starkly black, speckled and feathery and creamy, bearing the marks of humanity and yet ever wrestling, and sublimely so, melding matter and dream, consciousness and the unconscious, symbol and myth, with a mean-ing, an ongoing mystery of incarnation, in excess of all signs and signings, beyond its own deceptiveness and, no doubt, the déception that attends them in the endless tussle of shifting codes and telluric undecodableness.

THE PLASTIC LIFE OF THE PSYCHE: DANIÈLE PERRONNE Let us begin at the generally recognised beginning – although all plastic, aesthetic beginnings plunge their roots deep, and incalculably, into a richly fertilising soil of consciousness, sensuality and emotion – and speak, firstly, of Danièle Perronne’s rope works of the early 1980’s, works, as Pierre Rappo suggests, intensely physical, there in all their loose and bound fibrousness, yet ‘metaphysical’ too, catapulted into some poetic, strangely interior space that their many daily uses deny.1 Objects recovering, in silence, something of their ‘total power of language and meaning, their almost naked clarity’. The 1981 Suspension de cordes marines (diameter 40 cm) reveals a thick old piece of rope curled into an aerated mass, adorned, distracted from its former labours with the profuseness of thin, tangled and dangling strings, rope infants crawling over and aimlessly caressing their parent body, the whole hanging, dancing, in any ambient breeze – yet caught in a space-time now all its own. Such ropes, their teeming resonance of sea and air, manipulating hands and wood and metal adjacencies receding into the intrinsic lyricism of their being, may further emphasise their withdrawal from the utilitarian in works such as Corde dans une boîte (1981). Here, we may be tempted to insist upon the protection of the seemingly minimal, an honouring, a consecration even, of what Pierre Dhainaut terms ‘the poverty of the elements used’. There is, however, no derision or ludicity as with Manzoni’s Merda d’artista; rather Perronne invites us to sense the strange preciousness of a particular material ‘presence’ caught, enshrined, yet beyond all fetishism, in the energy of its stilled and suspended movement unfolded before us in the ‘unknown realm’ (as Jean-François Leblond writes) of its intrinsicalness. But this beginning can quickly be seen to show its hybridity: already can be appreciated what will turn out to be Danièle Perronne’s life-long fascination with boxes, those spaces – though they remain,

1

See Selected Bibliography. A personal website may be consulted: www.perronne.fr.

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too, objects in their own right, just as a theatrical stage, and indeed the entire theatre, cannot be divorced from its performances, its contained dramatisations and spectacles – of framing, gathering, presentation. And then, already too, in 1981, we witness Perronne’s gentle, deeply contemplative obsession with cloth, especially white cloth, and cloth with its richly varying plis, its foldingness, its unfoldedness. Perronne’s various plis blancs of the 1981-84 period, often being designated simply Sans titre, offer softness and crispness, vast plains of what Pierre Garnier happily calls some ‘cerebral far North’, and exquisite vortices or spectacularly starred and starchy high reliefs. Her folds gather and open, reveal seeming slits and partitions that yet do not divide oneness, the music of some unstated One. They may fall, hang, display freely ranging verticalities that, too, speak of ascension; or they may ball and clump, curve and spin their circularities. If there is no evidence to support Pierre Rappo’s claim that such art constitutes ‘a means of struggling against illness’ – we know, of course, of many writers and artists who would deem art’s doing, its poiein, to be a consolatio, a resistance to and even transcendence of suffering, however experienced2 – it is that all autobiography, all anecdotality dissolve away in Danièle Perronne’s work, not so as to evacuate the real, operate some radical hygienic leap into some dreamed aesthetic purity, but better to allow access to the mythical, poetic potential of a reality – cloth, rope, wood – masked by its apparent and discarded utilitarian ‘insignificance’.3 La Grande Reprise of 1982 is a large (90 x 130 cm) white ‘sheet-unpainting’, we might (clumsily, it is true) term it – for conventional canvas disappears and paint is replaced by the bleachedness of white cloth and the tweaking (and small patchingcollaging) of the latter to form a few largely vertical ridges upon an otherwise bare expanse. Works like this or the various Sans titre of the same year strike us as establishing a space, of sensuousness and meditation, ‘both near and far’, as Dhainaut has put it, or in the words of Jacques Lepage, a space reaching out to some ‘vertiginous point where the void gapes open, an unplaceable abyss totalising being and

2 Sophie Calle, Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois have all spoken at times in this manner, but of course the work of writers from Scève to Mallarmé to Proust may be said to be founded on similar emotional ground. 3 Michel Deguy’s wonderful ‘L’insignifiant’ bears reading in this context (Figurations, 1969, Gallimard).

The Plastic Life of the Psyche: Danièle Perronne

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universe’. The landscapes folded and unfolded before us, though discreet, radically understated, seem to harmonise with a certain asceticism, a solitary experience of being, but they load no emotionally absolute dice: nothing here disallows ecstasy or serenity, any more than it urges melancholy, a sense of loss or abandonment. And then there are those exquisitely delicate Sans titre of 1983 and 1984, noticeably different in format (35 x 45 x 3 cm and 90 x 130 cm, respectively), where the landscape is suddenly convulsed into a beauty à la Breton, a beauty of phantasm, desire, dream, otherness, a beauty where pain and sheer elegance, the fire of eros and the beyond-passion of agapè turn inside out the presumed humdrum realness of a few bits of old bedsheeting. The 1982 Suite de cinq panneaux (each panel 60 x 60 cm) possesses the profound mystery of the entire universe, imaging at once its seemingly serene, barely rippled continuity and its partitionedness (into an infinity of times, spaces, modes, etc), its sleek unified apparent simplicity and the swarming underlying com-plex-ity of its foldedness, all of this accomplished by a few panels of pleated white cloth, and a discretion reminiscent of the work of Geneviève Asse. Another 1984 Sans titre returns us to the im-pli-cations of an energy, the universe’s, the body’s, the mind’s, twisted, contorted, swirling, at once explosive and implosive, this central figure of energy at the same time deployed upon and within the symbolically vaster space-time of the white cloth’s smooth tranquillity – the whole effect brought about in some tiny creative microspace of 35 x 24 x 15 centimetres. And, lest we doubt the consciousness the artist herself has of being immersed, via her own gesture of doing and being in a living here and now of cosmic unfoldingness and enfoldedness, we need only gaze upon the detail Perronne has chosen to feature of her 1982 Petit pli blanc, where we may imagine ourselves transported, by the magic of some powerful poetic microscope or telescope, into the teeming invisible subtext of matter or else the infinite landscape of stars undreamed – yet this, via the substance of a real very much of our earth. ‘Near and far’, indeed. Pierre Garnier has spoken eloquently and admiringly of the early boîtes, that, too, form an integral part of Danièle Perronne’s three-pronged aesthetic self-initiation. Already in 1981 we have seen the wooden box enter the plastic scene in order to contain (though not to tame) and enshrine (though not to idolatrously worship) the raw

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energeia of rope and string entanglements. In the same year we witness the creation of Boule blanche avec une ficelle dans une boîte. It is a small (24 x 16 x 10 cm) elegantly bare work revealing the quirkiness of a suspended string rearing up as if compelled by some snake charmer, and, for the first time, we see too that soon-to-be-obsessional white ball lying still, abundantly implicit and literal simultaneously, on the box’s bare floor. Other boxes come quickly. There are the two 1982 works, identically titled Petite boîte à fond d’argile, for example, the one described as containing ‘a starred Virgin Mary face upon a glass ball [and] a white metal circle’, the other, plainer, though no less enigmatic, described as presenting ‘three balls filled with water’. Or there is the small 1983 Boîte blanche à fond d’argile avec un cercle (19 x 24 x 7 cm) that rivals the Boîte avec une petite boule blanche in a sparseness shrinking even further via the tininess of the creation (14 x 17 x 7 cm). With works like these we enter a microworld of poetic puzzlement that yet clearly leaps beyond gratuitousness. A stark, sober, though illuminated world, offering a theatre of endless reflection and muted implication: the logics of circularity (circles), origin (: clay, egg-ball), unified difference (: A + B + C forming Z), limit and openness (: the box at once containing but never closing), meaning and uninterpretableness (: of material givenness), and so on. ‘The landscape of [Perronne’s] boxes is eternity’, Garnier rightly asserts, and this, although they and their contents remain the material stuff of our humanness: glass, wood, string, clay, steel, etc. An art of the ‘carnal’ and the ‘cosmic’ fused though in ‘extreme tension’ Dhainaut terms such an art: an art of ambiguity, he adds, though I should see it as one of plurivalence, an unspeakableness welling up from the unconscious and corresponding to what Perronne calls ‘inner necessity’, whereby self and other, from the centre of their mystery, freely exchange and merge their ‘spiritual energy’. Speaking with Garnier in 1981 of the objects to be found in her boîtes – and no doubt such thinking continues to have its pertinence for our understanding of the very recent and more manifestly pseudonarrativised boxes we shall shortly attend to – Danièle Perronne emphasises the psychic resonance of common objects, their forgotten, silent sacredness known better to ‘archaic societies’. But, she insists, any ‘shamanism’ involved is directed at the self’s personal well-being and implies no sorcery, objects being resituated in what Pierre Garnier nicely describes as a Noah’s ark ‘box of meaning’, but one, as Perronne notes, whose landscape (of


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meaning, pertinence) remains that of ‘some beyondness’, an unspace (as we have seen Gérard Titus-Carmel write) that hints at an ontology only articulatable in plastico-poetic language. The 1984 Boîte à la roue (40 x 33 x 10 cm), or again a work of the same year given to us as Intérieur d’une boîte blanche, such works amply deploy that deep, but unpretentious idiosyncraticalness of Danièle Perronne’s boxes. What is this tiny [bike or pram] wheel doing, alongside two candles; what is the circular white hoop doing against this backcloth of bulbous and fissured clay nomansland? Perplexity and fascination rival one another. We recognise and do not recognise. We puzzle and we muse. The sheer earthiness of these microtheatres we cannot fail to feel, and yet we know we have simultaneously slipped through Cocteau’s Orphic mirror to find ourselves in a world of swarming meta-physical connotations. Nevertheless, our freedom remains absolute and we sense that no object is constrained, tethered, despite adjacency, contiguity. Each boîte, we intuit, has become an exemplary locus of our pure is-ness, that Apollinairian il y a, a thatness-there all around us in its intrinsic lyricism, its strange and wondrous song of being. These works of the 1980’s do not, however, establish a permanence of whiteness, light, purity. Perronne’s gesture and instinctive consciousness never turn away, in some blind denial, from forces, plastic, material and implicitly psychic, that speak of darkness, eclipse, dense penumbra, what Pierre Dhainaut describes as ‘buried matter, the abyss within us as within the earth[,] vast germinating and regenerative obscurity’. Already in certain Plis blancs we are alerted to a shadowiness ever enfolded into illumination, into the shining revealedness of being.4 But in works like Chaos I and Chaos II (both 1983, both 80 x 100 cm), cloth blackens, its folds clump and lump, its atmospherics becomes heavy, murky, oppressive, despite the sense we may have of its inevitable remaining link to the luminous and, in consequence, a logic beyond flat binarity and opposition. If it is true that a work like Sans titre (1984), with its glistening dark sheen and forms that seem never far from the monstrous, the nightmarish – if it is true that we sense here a penetration of realms of hellish convulsiveness, we know too that we are at the heart of a symbolic contemplation of 4 Such imbrication of light and darkness invites a Derridian reading, but we could also think of Char’s La Nuit talismanique.

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the psyche’s intense complexity, its tussle with fear and desire, vulnerability and bold confrontation. Pierre Garnier understands that ‘ecstasy’ can be lived in the world of darkness as in the world of whiteness, no doubt because it is synonymous with awe, a sense of deep wonder before all that is. And, if, through the folds of whiteness, being’s deep obscurities may be glimpsed, so too, in the 1984 Sans titre (60 x 60 cm), with its heavy vertical folds in thick black material, or in the 1987 ever untitled Sans titre (35 x 45 x 3 cm), with its chunkily corded vertical felt bands glued onto a wooden support – so too light may flicker, whiteness flash and glow, never suggesting some absolute and materio-psychical state dominating our experience of being. The latter remains without name, title, firm and definitive ‘entitlement’, a magma ‘chaotic’ because unrationalisable, endlessly shifting in its reality and above all, in its thinkableness. The two very beautiful Plis de terre ocre rouge, both 1984, both 40 x 40 x 3 cm, and, like so many of Danièle Perronne’s plis, sculptural, revealing unrevealable and purely implicit depth in its 3 centimetres, perhaps constitute something of a pinnacle of aesthetic achievement with fabric. Both are framed; both evoke the astonishingly complex invagination and ceaseless excrescence, the implosive and explosive manners of physicality, the universe’s barely imaginable simultaneous (and perhaps synonymous) heterogeneity and unifiedness, the profound mystery of being’s power to exalt and to frighten, to offer a sublimeness where A and Z are inseparable. Two works of the 1986-87 period will serve to emphasise what I have just argued and, at the same time, usher in a diversification in Danièle Perronne’s démarche that will reveal a significant turn towards, firstly, painting, and secondly, a dramatic return to the art of the boîte. The first of these two works is the fairly large (100 x 100 x 30 cm) 1986 Revenants, the second the distinctly large (210 x 100 cm) 1987 Tapisserie. Revenants is a most strange piece that Perronne will subsequently relate to ancient African tribal straw masks or heads. It offers a great thirty centimetre-protuding wild clump of string and fibre. Two eyes, barely visible, gaze at the viewer through this dense and dark tousled jungle mounted on a large metre-square support, the whole hung, simultaneously picture and sculpture, yet escaping both traditions. La Tapisserie, on the other hand – but hierarchy and absolute distinction remain ceaselessly undone and relative here – gives us


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tapestry, a wovenness, an orchestration of the com-plex (: fold or string upon, with, fold and string), an elegance that reassures, proposing a cultivation of the turbulent, the perhaps otherwise anarchical. The ancient, ‘primitive’ and obscure forces figured in Revenants – our ontic ‘ghostliness’, ever lurking below smoothed surface comportments, a drama our media lay before us every hour of every day – thus, would appear to give way to an art of enlightened entanglement, a harmonious melding of multiplicity, teeming plurality. What comes at this point – Perronne’s Journal of 1987-90 – should not surprise. Its intimacy has not, as I write, been offered to public exhibition, although the artist has decided to reveal certain of its painted pages in Danièle Perronne: Oeuvres, 1980-2010. The intimacy laid before us here – I have had the opportunity to see the entire and substantial Journal with its pencilled drawings, its pastels, its sanguine and its acrylic paintings on Canson paper – lies buried, abstracted, latent and purely lyricised in the many works we have already examined, as in those we shall soon attend to. The Journal offers to the self a confirmation of that ground, that emotional, spiritual (in the broadest sense of the term), that dreaming, brooding and musing humus in which grow the strange flowers of Perronne’s plis, her cordes, creations such as her early Boîte avec une petite boule blanche, or the wonderful about-to-bloom acrylics like Numéro 1 (1995) or Le Triptyque de l’horloge (2007), or, yet again, the full and fecund or, alternately serenely unadorned boxes of the last few years, Perplexité (2007), for example, or La Jeune Fille (2008). Danièle Perronne’s Journal is many things, but above all it is a celebration of personal, lived existence – but, and this is what distinguishes it, it is simultaneously a celebration of the multifacetted upliftments afforded by plastic creativity itself. The Portrait de ma nouvelle boîte de peintures acryliques affirms this from the outset, and does so in a landscape of Redonesque astral floralness and a facing page of spectacular chromatic and formal exuberance situated, moreover, beyond all anecdotal reduction. Delicate, swirling, barely decipherable but yet hyperpresent love letters bathe in edenic dreamed un-scenes of pure pigment. Scenarios of death vie with the stunning vitality of the very elements that evoke such reveries. The language of poets floats everywhere amongst the artist’s own ‘babblings’, as she can term them, curling, cascading, flowing endlessly in corners, inhabiting full pages,

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loci of energy in themselves or draped about, or in and out of, trees, bushes, figures on a dream-like half-legible atmosphere of the unconscious. Movement and multiplicity reign. We are in a land of swarming aesthetic enchantment arisen, raw and delightful, immediate and sudden in its poeticity, from the daily swell of mind and emotion. Laughter, anger, tears, reconciliation, joy and love weave their ever shifting plastic curlicues, their fountains, their maelstroms and their tranquil glades of chromatic intensity and sublimeness. Angels descend and monsters can surge into view in the crowded folds of these paintings, at times, with their oneiric power, touching the surreal, but ever rooted in the authenticity of a known and felt real, the undying song of the self’s being-in-the-world whilst ever sensing the latter’s incalculable deep otherness. We can only hope that the many folded paintings, each 55 x 60 cm, of Danièle Perronne’s Journal will one day be unfolded and exhibited, side by side, in all their unassuming, but allconsuming grace. For, in so many ways, we may deem them to be the beautifully intoned but unsung mistress-piece of an entire oeuvre. 1995 is the year in which Danièle Perronne launches herself into an important and still ongoing adventure with painting taken out of the private realm so as to inhabit that intensely public and shared space her earlier cordes, plis and boîtes had from the outset invested. Certainly, other painted work precedes, stemming from the Journal and somewhat in the spirit of such intimacy – Sans titre (1992) is a lovely acrylic diptych, with collaged elements on wooden panels, and passages from the Cantique des cantiques de Salomon forming waves upon which ‘ride’ the mixed media elements of an enchanting shrinelike composition with its green chromatics – but with Numéro 1 (1995) begins a series that, without being consciously conceived of as a coherent whole, reveals manners and implicit preoccupations explored, developed, meditated from individual canvas to canvas. To gaze upon Numéro 1 – and let us realise that such a title seeks in no way to orient our reading of her work other than chronologically – is to enter a world of remarkably detailed composition and symmetry, a chromatic world too of exceptional subtlety. It is not, however, a geometrically produced world, its mathematics comes from the hand, not from the compass or slide-rule. Freely drawn, then painted ovals, circles, omegas dominate in the fabrication of a massive ‘overall’, a seamlessly continuous mosaical multi-gemmed pseudo-floral jewel of


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a canvas where, if we can argue that certain tightly interwoven forms/chromatics occupy the ‘foreground’ because of their size, it may equally be maintained that the ‘backcloth’ to such forms, often structured vertically and in horizontal belts, cannot be distinguished perspectivally – and, of course, to eliminate perspective involves an arguable departure from the earth’s spatiality and temporality, and a simultaneous affirmation of painting as, at once, a bi-dimensional space of plastic interiority and a locus of imagination’s adimensional interiorness. ‘A gesture limned / held back / condensed within itself’, Bernard Noël writes in his poem for the aptly titled book, Un lieu sans bords, done with Danièle Perronne in 2000 and speaking broadly of her painting, ‘demanding at once more thereness/more beyondness’. Certainly, as Noël also points out in his Roman des passages of 1999, a life is laid down in works such as Perronne’s Numéro 1, or her equally extraordinary Juin 1997 ou La Fontaine or, again – and I choose quite arbitrarily – Printemps 1998 or the 1999 Totem (also titled Le 1er février), but life is finely, patiently, distilled, ‘decanted’, as Pierre Reverdy argued of all art, laid down as a vast gesture of autobiopoièse, to borrow this time Michel Deguy’s term.5 Life, that of body and mind, deployed beyond all recognition of its earthiness, laid down as a painting of paintng, the ‘poem of the poem’, as Deguy (again) once described it.6 Perronne herself likes, rather, to quote Nietzsche’s vision of ‘art [as] the musical mirror of the world’, seeing her paintings as musical partitions, and, in consequence, beyond the constraints of language, its ‘divisiveness’, its obsessive requirement of analysis, definition, categorising limitation of being’s dance. Paintings such as Perronne’s are almost unimaginably intricate, they appear to vibrate and swim and float in a yet stilled infinity, often, as in Juin 1997, bathing in that ‘luminous lymph [which is, as Noël rightly suggests,] the binding element of [her painting’s] cell-like particles’ – an element Perronne herself often sees as reminiscent of the blues of Fra Angelico. Perronne’s Printemps 1998 or Totem should not be seen as decorative, withdrawn into some self-satisfied aestheticism. Their cre-

5

See Deguy’s Jumelages/Made in USA (Seuil, 1978). Beyond what may be thought of as factuality or that hum-drum ‘self-story’ of which Deguy can equally speak, distilled rather into the strange ‘poieiticity’ of the bio, into a selfness and a beingness of art. 6

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ative processs and their plastic actuality are steeped in meditation, a querying of human and cosmic order, and, in consequence, the latter’s orientation, direction. The suspendedness of the painting’s teeming particles and movements, the impossibility of attributing to the latter definitive (symbolic) orientation, constitutes, in Perronne’s eyes, a plastic questioning of the nature, the locus, the pointedness of our beingness. If in purely personal emotional terms Perronne desires ‘some spiritual ascension’, this simultaneously and in (only) seeming contradiction with her rationalised atheistic take on existence – and she cites Newman’s view that today’s ‘cathedrals’ rise up from the self, from its secret affective and psychic life, rather than from Christic or other religious belief – she appreciates that art, her Numéro 1 or Novembre 1998 (with its play of light and darkness, its exploding and curling signs of chromatico-formal energy) or Totem (with its vertical panels of endlessly dovetailing and unsituatable and finally indescribable shapes and brilliantly hued entities), does not lend itself to stable interpretation, meaning residing rather, and royally, in its infinite contemplatableness, an ‘ambiguity’ that is ever regenerative, offering genesis, an ever querying recommencement and rejigging of consciousness. Perronne’s painting of the next decade or so, right up to the present day, does not content itself with these earlier plastic explorations, ever shifting its chromatic focus, its structural manner, as well as conceptual self-perception – and this, without ever losing a fundamental and deeply original identity. Take, for example, Le 1er septembre 2001, where we are perhaps surprised to find a chromatics of sepia or what the artist prefers to call red ochre, a modal shift Danièle Perronne will continue occasionally to experiment with (Le 17 août 2000 is a consciously articulated Variation du Numéro 1, giving, of course, a radically different atmospherics). Complexity of structure remains, but already subdued elements of verticality (pale short thin ‘poles’) are further softened by swarming, swimming, curvaceous amoebic forms overlapping, intermingling, in some sensual dance of pigment and implicit, but only purely implicit, creative energy. Infinity of the latter, its produceable forms, its processes, the proliferating relationships thus set in motion, its purposes, values, pertinencies, its ‘programme’ – such infinity we are ever conscious of, as we gaze upon Le 1er septembre 2001; we sense that the artist’s hand and mind,


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though producing this particular image of infinity, of unending creation, plastic or cosmic, could have – and, in effect, will soon have – produced, like infinity’s streaming, gushing materiality and psychicalness themselves, a painting of utterly different orchestration and tonality. In this sense, Le 1er Septembre 2001 is a dynamic figure of the emergence of all manifestations of all that is, all that can be. And, precisely thereby, it is a living sign of that unity Perronne sees through all of her painted work. Le Triptyque de l’horloge (2007) is a large acrylic work (210 x 100 cm) that Danièle Perronne has discussed at some length with Jean-Philippe Catonné.7 Like many of the boîtes, both the early ones and those we shall shortly examine of the past four years or so, an arguable thematic of origin, passing of time, mortality and conceivable transcendence is at play. Certainly, such an argument stems from the central ‘panel’ of the pseudo retable with its clock, or rather layered clocks, whose structure seems inverted in the outermost clock, the VI becoming IA (without the bar) – and, furthermore, such temporal ambiguity and plurality seems steeped in a meltingness, a diffusion of time’s form as its relativity, its warpableness melds with the cosmic features barely limned. Time, in the Triptyque, whirls and spins, bubbles and blurs. The first ‘panel’, La Comète, in particular, generates ellipses, in what Danièle Perronne terms a ‘joyous waltz’, luminous, elegant, a musica universalis such as a Pythagoras or a Kepler might perhaps have conceived of such time plunged into the mystery of the cosmos, between divinity and the pure mathematics of materiality. The third ‘panel’ of Le Triptyque de l’horloge reveals, and once more via a chromatics of very great subtlety and intensity, a proliferation of atomised and pseudoplanetary forms, speckled, starred, ever seemingly birthing from some major luminous, radiating source placed at the top of the painting, a source beyond numbers though clock-like, flowing forth timeless time, an ongoingness far beyond human designations. The implications – but they remain only that, latent, unstable, anthropomorphic – thrust mortality up against (though not in opposition to) eternalness; evoke a cosmic scenario of endless transformation of being’s manifestations; remind us of the manner in which con7

A CD of Catonné’s exchanges with Perronne is available via the artist’s own website.

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sciousness dreams and projects its representations and imaginings of being, its logic, its functionings; and so on. Speaking of L’Horloge des sables, also 2007, in which clocks once again feature their proliferative, warping and interlocking propensities, Perronne tells JeanPhilippe Catonné that ‘the clock’s mechanism evokes for me Aristotle’s god of metaphysics’ and that Bernard Noël’s notion of passage in his study of her painting originated in what she herself sees as her own sense (and spontaneous portrayal) of ‘time’s passing into a beyondness of time’, a passing that, because it involves a meditation of seeming polarities (that would yet be diffused into relationality, even equivalency, unity, via the movement of A > A+ (or B, or Z), reflects Perronne’s own only seemingly paradoxical embrace of, simultaneously, an atheistic materialism of the unknowable and a mysticism where the divine, though equally unnameable, is lived and felt as a force of transcendent power and awing beauty. If the 60 x 60 cm 2007 acrylic Le 15 août displays similar preoccupations to those arguably at the centre of Le Triptyque and L’Horloge des sables, preoccupations at once plastico-chromatic (radiance, circularity, atomisation, blues, reds, luminous whites and a range of other distinct yet intermingling colorations) and symbolic (cosmic immenseness, complexity, teeming energies, creation/Creation, etc.), we observe too angularities, sharp, probing, perhaps combative, violent, implicit representations of the inconceivable tussle of the creative–destructive transmutational principles at the heart of matter – and perhaps consciousness, psychicalness, too. A painting such as this certainly revamps in radical terms the forms and composition of, say, Juin 1997 ou la Fontaine, seemingly more serenely structured, stable despite its vast intricacy, but, in effect, pointings, explosive cascadings, vast creative interlockings and becomings remain at stake in both paintings. One could argue a not dissimilar diversification and continuity in the brilliant Lever du jour of 2007. Here, a certain compositional aeration has come about, as if we were perhaps focussing in on a particular materio-physical moment or event; we see better the elegance of simpler forms that yet retain their enigmaticalness, their mystery; light floods our vision, revealing and dazzling; matter’s energy proffers configurations slowed down better to self-manifest yet still defying our comprehension and implicitly caught up in the still infinite logic of a localised musica universalis. A work such as the


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2008 Pluie I takes us even closer in, in our gaze dir-ected towards the physical realness of matter and the meta-physical implications such realness may be said to generate, at once masking them and silently speaking them. Pluie I rains down on the retina the scintillations, the infinity, the life-givingness of an element we may take for granted. But, if the structure of Danièle Perronne’s painting, as Garnier rightly maintains, is poetical, lyrical, so, beyond its dailiness, is that of the world, here rain. If Pluie I suspends brilliant drops of colour, its suspends too our impulse to depoetise matter, to bypass its sheer, exquisite, mysterious and alive beingness, its gift and its beauteousness. The artist, we have observed, describes her painting as a ‘musical mirror of the world’, whereas Anne Teyssiéras has spoken of the ‘antagonistic, complementary, proteiform world’ of Danièle Perronne’s painting, its capacity to assume ever different forms both of itself and, symbolically, of the physical world, be it a few beads of rain or the entire cosmos. The large (146 x 88 cm) acrylic titled Le 1er février 2007 ou Cosmogonie is the last of the paintings I should like to look at here, before turning our attention to Danièle Perronne’s most recent creations, boxes such as Marie Madeleine (2007), La Fenêtre (2008) and Vie antérieure (2009). Le 1er février clearly engages with ancient myths and representations of creation, origination, the seeding, the procreation (gon) of the cosmos. The latter’s absolute ‘logic’, its cosmology, is not itself at stake, but rather the marvellous, astounding energies, dark and brilliant at once, conflictual, contrastive, and complementary, fusional, almost indistinguishable, synonymous, so far in excess of language, human logos, do they appear. Jean-Philippe Catonné reads the small white forms couched securely in some amniotic fluid as eggs, semen, and, indeed, the entire painting being flooded with such forms, the universe may be said to be a locus of infinite and constant, ongoing (self-)fertilisation, coming-into-being and (self)mutation, self-differentiation-within-unity. Powerful tensional energies are portrayed via dramatic forms and configurations and chromatic intensity. Perronne herself looks through such a free figural representation of ‘the birth of the world’ and the ‘creation of the universe’ to the process via which both her own work comes about and her selfness, her inner being, is in a constant re-creative flux and selfreconstitution. If, then, Catonné is justified in perceiving in Cosmogo-

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nie a ‘celestial combat of Titans’ – and Perronne does not argue against the idea – we may see it as reflective of that endless intellectual, spiritual and emotional tussle of all psyches, all consciousnesses, now serene, now turbulent, ever reborn into a strange becoming originality. Perronne’s most recent boîtes thrust us into brilliant microtheatres rich in a latent narrativity that ever evades declarative thesis, coherent designation, solidifying self-interpretation. The 2007 Marie Madeleine offers elegance and relative simplicity without the, again, relative austerity of the boîtes of the 1980’s. Its fabrication is deemed by Perronne to be fortuitous, a spontaneous coming together of a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Mary Magdalene and a clock spring. There is no clutter, no excess, but a clear-minded justaposition-cum-fusion of, on the one hand, a symbol of ideal beauty, a beauty thus plucked from time and its possible ‘abasements’, its seeming diminishing of the human, restored to the ‘good’, the ‘true’, the atemporalness of divine beauty, and, on the other hand – but the hands join, clasp one another – time’s supposed violence wrought upon ideality. La Jeune Fille of 2008 revisits such elements of thought and plastic modelling, with an equally elegantly reduced yet symbolically full small boîte (23 x 34 x 5 cm). The year 2007 produces some very fine works, in effect: La Porte, for example, or La Boîte à l’ange, or La Grande Boîte bleue, dite Perplexité. La Porte, a box of marginally increased size compared to that of Marie Madeleine (30 x 40 cm > 40 x 34 cm) is, for Pierre Dhainaut, ‘emblematic’, along with La Fenêtre (2008), of much of her work with boxes: we are of course faced with doors, locks, keys, closedness, secrecy, unknownness, potential opening, the possibility of gazing, penetrating via sight, mind, sensing, consciousness, through opaqueness, even an overtness – which turns out to be semblance or swarming symbolics, a teeming revealedness that yet houses invisibleness and invites our querying, feeds our desire and suggests our seething, unstabilisable complexities. La Porte, like most of the boîtes of this new period, begins to accumulate and multiply both its possible conceptual contents and the elements of its plastic fabrication. Wooden planks, an old rusted lock, a collaged sanguine or red ochre image of a woman’s face and neck, her forehead wreathed in leaves, other unidentifiable tattered images above and below the face, possibly also collaged: this is what La Porte thrusts be-


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fore us. Textures speak their differences, colours their harmonies. Creative process endlessly works over obsession, unconscious recurrence. The box is at once a unified whole and a locus of com-plication, folded differences. Its fabrication-cum-conception is instinctively oriented, not rationally constructed from a set of a priori notions. La Porte tells, musingly, its a-story, never leading or overdetermining. In this, it inevitably has links to surrealising process, dream, le merveilleux, psychic automatism, an antirational freedom that yet senses some strange magnetism of functioning at its centre. La Boîte à l’ange et au pectoral de la Nouvelle-Irlande (2007) provides ample evidence of such processual and plastic fashioning. It is a place of the raw and the cooked, pure foundness and borrowed refinement. Catonné speaks of a conjuncture of opposites, of ‘life and death, health and illness, hope and despair, self-assurance and disarray’. Perronne’s own description suffices to concretise such abstraction: ‘the tiny white man [...] sits above a dead toad lying at his feet. The man is imploring this astonishing ‘pectoral’ from New Ireland, gazing up at it. High above him a phallic ex-voto haloed with sharp spikes like those used in African nailed fetishes where the nails probably are sunk deep to also thank magic powers. A rope hangs down – to hang oneself with? Or else ...? On the right, a Quattrocento angel of the Annunciation, and, in the basement, a crab is swimming’. And there are fruits, flowers, vertically stacked logs (: supports?), cloudlike bits of cotton, a moon-like luminous ball or sphere half-hidden behind a rustic fence, a white hoop only two-thirds intact, the whole seemingly set against a painted backcloth of subtle texture and varying chromatic brilliance. To peer into the impressive arsenal of objects in the artist’s studio, found or bought at Parisian flea markets, is to appreciate how such heteroclitic ensembles may cohere. Always, however, an instinctual aesthetic orchestration is apparent in Perronne’s work: La Boîte à l’ange or La Boîte aux lettres or the 2008 Passions are not jumbles, a careless casting together of the disparate. They reveal a caressive hand and mind, ever sensitive to colour, shape, composition, texture, the intrinsic beauty of each element as well as the aeration of the bizarrely and fascinatingly unified microstage that is the boîte. Pierre Dhainhaut has rightly argued the pertinence of vertical relationships and correspondences in La Boîte à l’ange as elsewhere, but horizontality also operates its osmosis – as well as the chal-

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lenging puzzlements of such contiguity and imbric-ations. The aeration always manifest in Perronne’s arrangements may seem to generate an aesthetics of serene disharmony, but it simultaneously creates a space in which such disharmony – the vertical connection, say, in Passions, between the dice, the plant and the lizard below, or else, horizontally, between dice, tangled white string, apple, woman’s circular portrait, etc. – may be thought through, appreciated as having secret poetical and conceptualisable harmonies in addition to their individual plastico-material aesthetic claims. Pierre Garnier has seen the recent boîtes of Danièle Perronne – as he sees all art – as stelae erected against death, the onslaught of time. Undoubtedly, such an analysis has much validity, but the boîtes equally, it is the other face of such an argument, delve deep and long into the sheer exhilaration life’s teeming contents afford: they are, thus, celebrations, excitements, spontaneously assembled objoies Francis Ponge might call them, objeux too, though, as I have already argued, neither idle nor derisory – as they were not for Ponge. La Grande Boîte bleue, dite Perplexité, certainly, relays concern, anxiety, irresolution before the enigmas and ceaseless becomings of a human history that does not seem capable of fulfilling dreams of progress, harmonised accomplishment, stability. But contemplation and exhortation – in the continuing figure of the tiny ‘philosopher’ perched on the residue of a Greek temple – persist. Consciousness pursues its signs, relentlessly. And the boîte is song, lyricalness, poiein; like the ‘eggs’, visible or hidden, Perplexité itself remains the sign, what Perronne refers to as a ‘secret promise’, of new flowerings or birthings. La Fenêtre (2008), upon first appearance, may seem, in any age of spiritual scepticism, an ironic reprise of Botticelli’s work representing the Virgin Mary’s writing of the Magnificat. We know, however, that such reproductions as figure commonly in Perronne’s boîtes, never aim to deride, but rather both to honour delicacy, beauty, meditativeness, serenity, and to adapt to recent perceptions and intuitions that are deeply personal. In Perronne’s version of La Fenêtre, as recounted to Jean-Philippe Catonné in 2008, only the writing hand of the Virgin Mary, held by the hand of the infant Jesus, remains visible; the gaze of the angel holding the inkwell is diverted from Mary to a hanging key: the mystery of the divine is transferred to that of writing and creation themselves, though exquisite delicacy of human presence and sheer


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physicality continues to radiate everywhere. The ‘window’ that is simultaneously the opening through which we glimpse the transformed Botticelli narrative, and the entire boîte itself, is, moreover, partly veiled: Perronne’s is an art of discretion, semi-revelation; its opening is onto the interiority of the individual gazer’s understanding, a place of intimate creation matching that staged within the box. What such an art celebrates is ultimately the possibility of contemplation, invention (invenire: to find), reinvention, freedom, non-closure. A celebration of feasible exuberance in a world that might perplex, for so often ‘narrated’ as a locus of loss, menace and imprisonment. I bring to an end this critique of an art of high sensitivity and equally fine-boned subtlety by evoking one more very recent smallish boîte (19.5 x 17 x 5 cm) bearing at once that unpretentious title, date of completion and a dual designation: Boîte. Position I et II. Septembre 2009. Here we have, framed within a frame, rough, unfinished wood that, in the lipped hole probably left by a now missing branch, reveals an eye, now closed (Position I), its lashes hanging thickly from its plastic doll’s lid, now open (Position II), riveting, watchful, fixed upon a world now reflected within it. Position I silently speaks of the pertinence of sleep, restfulness, dream and an inner life commonly understated; of possible refusal, too, perhaps, of fright and nightmare; of yet, the invisibleness of much of being, or its simple unsayableness in visual and ‘concrete’, rationally demonstrable terms; and so on. Position II, whilst seeming to symbolise all that might appear to be in opposition to such modes and states, we should no doubt see as complementary, beyond binarity, fused in fact with the symbolics of Position I’’s remake of Redon’s Les Yeux clos. Observation, absorption of exteriorness, ‘reality’, nameableness of the latter in the light of day and rationality, a seenness yet, like the nomination we attach to it, never absolute, for ever rethinkable, changing like Monet’s haystacks with every blink, every implacably new present: certainly, Position II stages the silent theatre of such possible conjecture as to the nature of our seeing and our unseeing. The two ‘positions’, taken together, articulate, finely and with a delightful raw elegance, the tensionality and complexity Danièle Perronne senses, intuitively knows and lives at the centre of our inseparable physical-psychical experience. We enter here, but serenely, beautifully, via art’s equilibration of proximity and distancing, a powerful symbolic theatre of our

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beingness, where an infinity lies, ‘dripping away’, Yves Bonnefoy would say, at the very heart of what we see as our finiteness, but what we may dream and even day-dream as our living transcendence of our strange material flagrancy.

STRUCTURE AND AERATION, FREEDOM AND THE UNNAMEABLE: DANIEL DEZEUZE The notebooks of Daniel Dezeuze, appearing under the unspectacular title of Textes et notes 1967-1988, might lead one to believe that we are to be faced with an art of dry theorisation where sociopolitical thesis reigns over what we might feel is art’s essential claiming of ease, freedom, its very disinclination to suffer constraints and dictates of all and every colour. A close reading of these rich and compactly meditated texts, however, reveals Dezeuze’s overriding desire, and felt need, for a thoroughly informed consciousness of the history of painting, its limitations and blind spots, its endless remaining potentialities and renewableness. In short, despite – but, equally, in consequence of – Dezeuze’s serious dalliance with materialism and structuralism, despite his refusal of narcissistic lyricism, despite his refusal of art as a repository of identifiable and externally authorisable meaning, there is a vigorous embrace, implied in all of these selfpositionings, of openness of debate, an embrace too of art’s energies, energies that, whilst recognised from the outset, become more viscerally lived with the resumption (in the mid-1970’s) of drawing, with its ephemeralness, its fragileness, its heightened connection to the body’s immediacy, its intrinsic gesturalness. And from the outset too Daniel Dezeuze knows that all critical evaluation runs the risk of tipping the scales towards some moral position, a pseudoreligious ideology undermining the very openness he feels art can, indeed always inherently does, generate: ‘Art does not mean, he quotes Barbara Rose as suggesting, it is’. And so is it that the practice of art, whilst ever, and essentially, scrutinized by this avid reader of Barthes and Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan, this reader who completes a doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne, this in the midst of the discussions and activities of the Supports/Surfaces group – so is it that the practice of art, from the depths of its silence, its teeming unrepresentableness, ever will trump the abstraction and conceptualisation in which one may be tempted to immerse it.

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The earliest works of Daniel Dezeuze set a tone and establish modes of doing, of poiein, of poetic discretion and liberation, from which, globally speaking, his subsequent plastic activity will not depart, submitting them rather to infinite variation and renewal.1 (Even his many drawings of the last thirty or so years, whilst seeming to cleave Dezeuze’s production in half, are seen by the artist, and importantly so – I shall return to this – as inseparable from his painted works.) The silent manifesto that we may see written all over the 1967 Châssis avec feuilles de plastique tendue constitutes, as does all of Dezeuze’s work, not merely, indeed not at all essentially, a deconstructive and certainly not an off-handed destructive, gesture. Châssis reveals painting’s underbelly, points to the components allowing painting to deploy itself; robs it of the illusion it traditionally has generated; lets us, literally and metaphorically, see through painting; prepares a clean slate for its continuity, a radically renewed praxis buoyed up by a bold, serious and unflashy reconceptualisation. There is, moreover, no rough handling of (the materials of) painting: the frame, whether hand-made or purchased as is, is simple, unadorned, but crisply elegant, and it is laid with ease against the museum gallery wall, which we now understand to be the traditional support we have ignored in our privileging of the traditional hung scene of shimmering representation. Other early works of the next few years – Toiles ajourées (1967), say, or various Échelles de bois (1970), the 1972 Quadrillage de rubans de toile or the 1975 Grand colombage – display an equal measure of audacity and circumspection, an aesthetics of determined, vigorous refurbishing of the pictorial brought about via a discriminating and restrained practice stripped of all subjective flagrancy. Toiles ajourées thus offers us two white paintings, each pierced through with over forty fine vertical rectangles, like tiny meurtrières in the large diptych (2 x 195 x 130 cm), allowing the viewer to peep through the created, the made, to glimpse at once ‘madeness’ and what lies beyond it and constitutes its larger ‘medium’: walls, other works, people, etc. The various Échelles de bois of, say, the 1970-76 period, can be truly huge in their overall dimensions, whilst at the same time offering lightness, aeration, minimalness, as well as an ever sharp reminder, via their material delicacy, of 1 See Selected Bibliography. A personal website may also be consulted: www.danieldezeuze.com.

Structure and Aeration, Freedom and the Unnameable: Daniel Dezeuze

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art’s capacity to have us simultaneously and fully perceive the earth’s substance out of which it is woven, the space into which such substance is projected and which it in turn reveals, and, in a sense lastly, the artisanal craft underpinning the production of painting. For, we appreciate too that these vast non-ladders (62 x 422 cm / 300 x 1370 cm / 506 x 135.5 cm, for example) still remain ‘paintings’: they ‘hang’ on gallery or museum walls, they are paintings that show what (the doing of) painting is, is no longer, can be: all – canvas, surface, support, frame, paint, etc – is at once taken apart, reassembled, never precisely thrown away (for ever spectrally present in the viewer’s/artist’s mind), endlessly and repeatedly (and ever differently) repotentiated: painting becomes frame, multiple unified frames, frame becomes painting, wall becomes ‘canvas’, absence of canvas becomes a window upon infinity, void, the ‘frame’ is stained or painted or unpainted, ‘unpainting’ becomes painting, rigidity of frame- painting is swapped for supple wooden ribbons, painting’s absolute space can be folded (rolled) up (clinging to its material origins), matter becomes art yet represents itself, etc., etc. Our two remaining initial examples, the large (300 x 300 cm) Quadrillage de rubans de toile and the Grand colombage of equally significant dimensions (56 x 689 cm) both proceed in similar, but delightfully shifting manner to invite the viewer to enter the reopened and ever now reopening space of painting, drawing our attention simultaneously and inextricably to art’s reconceivedness and to its embeddedness in a materiality we had not thought capable of such supply adaptive application. The Quadrillage jubilantly and easefully, unaggressively, refigures a fundamental ingredient of painterly practice and conception and makes it, bends it into, painting itself, a splendid seethrough tapestry-like canvas, where canvas reconstitutes itself, sheds its traditionally required contents, is content with itself, becomes its own empty yet infinitely potential (non-)content. The Grand colombage is basic, elementary, spartan and ascetic in its huge horizontal ladder-like form of sparse wood veneer strips, geometrically orchestrated but just avoiding absolute structural symmetry and enjoying material suppleness. Painting, here, is both absent and re-presented. Beyond all mimesis other than in relation to itself and the physical, corporeal gesture responsible for it, the work offers a serene provocation as distinct from Dadaist fury or anguish as it is from disdain or

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sarcasm. A smiling warmth is conveyed rather, not stemming from creative pride but, I should maintain, from a recognition of art’s and matter’s discreet and fused fluidities, malleabilities. As in all structuring, an aesthetic principle remains at play, but Dezeuze’s aestheticism is of the most understated, self-effacing kind, one that speaks of matter’s centrality and modestly silences the claims of genial imagination even if such a work as Grand colombage requires original thinking and a fundamental renewal of plastic doing. Daniel Dezeuze’s early work is rooted in, at once, the brief but intense history of the Supports/Surfaces group arguably culminating in the large 1970 open-air display of the group’s collective plastic endeavours in the village of Coaraze; the extensive and related readings and writings Dezeuze’s Textes et notes, 1967-1989 renders abundantly clear, readings and writings both aesthetically significant (abstract and conceptual art, land art, minimal art, etc) and indicative of sociopolitical theoretical inclinations, psychoanalytical musings, awareness of the pertinence of the contemporary probing of linguistics, etc; the broader but interwoven discoveries of his six years in the USA, Mexico and Canada, years manifestly enlarging his aesthetic, cultural and political thinking. The Coaraze experience allows a firm confirmation of what Patrick Javault rightly regards as the unwavering imbrication in Dezeuze’s work of aesthetics and ‘ordinary experience’. This imbrication is as visible in his various 1982-3 Portes (pre-existing doors, now smoke-blackened, tarred, now cut into, painted red with flecking, propped against a white gallery wall) as it is in his numerous 1995 Réceptacles (with their expertly offhanded and relaxed and witty recycling of wire mesh, tennis rackets, skis, canes, metal objects of all sorts, plastic, etc.): an aesthetics of the everyman, the bricoleur, an aesthetics of intelligent, unfussy and unpretentious doing, somewhere at an unsituatable centre circled about by arte povere, ‘postminimalism’ (as Christian Besson has suggested, moving beyond an American minimalism with which Dezeuze has become thoroughly acquainted), Duchamp, Beuys and even the nouveaux réalistes. ‘Ordinary experience’ implies a thinking and doing with what is at hand, the kind of escape from the ‘heroic’ and the at once hyperintellectualized or narcissistically appropriating historical constraints of art we can observe Dezeuze accomplishing via, say, his 1975 Claie inachevée (150 x 63 cm), whereby the ‘finishedness’ of art (of, of


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course, Dezeuze’s own Échelles and his 1967 Châssis avec feuille de plastique tendue or the truly enchanting Quadrillage de rubans de toile we have seen) is cast aside, its ‘geometry’ accepted for what it is: that of a somewhat deformed bit of fencing-cum-trellising yet touched up with paint, thrown from its commonness, its homespun-andindustrial quotidianness, onto a stage of art where art’s ancestors may well scream in protest. But Dezeuze gives us, simultaneously, art and matter, an art where freedom asserts its challenging merits, an art where, as he says to Olivier Kaeppelin, ‘the off-limits and its gesticulation have replaced meditation on the limits (of the painting)’. New space, literal and metaphorical, suddenly becomes available via this liberation: a new poetics of space, but a new practice of spatialities of painting hitherto undreamt and only available through the experience of materials used. Painting thus transforms itself into an act and place of ‘knowledge’, as Patrick Descamps suggests: knowledge of painting and matter and, above all their inextricableness. Art, thus, whilst always speaking, in Dezeuze’s eyes, itself, its literalism – the 1975 Triangulation jaune has no lyrical, metaphorical or symbolic agenda, it speaks no language other than its form(edness), its coloration, its refusal to contain, deploy contents, develop illusion – does succeed, in the same gesture, in alerting us to its woodiness, its paperiness, its intrinsic plasticity. From the very heart of its ‘simplicity’, however, it generates, rather than the type of formed and semantic closure we may argue is achieved in a Poussin or a Breugel or a Delacroix, a possibility, an openness, an unobstructedness that painting’s ‘systems’, as Dezeuze will term them, have to date denied. Which is why both cubist art and abstract art are deemed by him to constitute the most significant movements of the 20th century. Works such as Dezeuze’s various Extensibles (1968-1997) or his recent ensemble of Nefs (2000-2001) are perfect vehicles of such an aesthetics – theory and practice – of art’s, ‘painting’’s, material and formal inherency. Their constituents are industrial, ‘neutral’, ‘banal’ – panels of trellising and polyethylene, respectively. Minimal modification is brought about: some painting or staining with the Extensibles or Panneaux extensibles (which vary greatly in size (70 x 23 cm, unfolding to 60 x 55cm; 90 x 340 cm, folded up to 123 x 49 cm); simple folding and fastening of the large white polyethylene sheets into the five boat-like Nefs forming a small (but largish) flotilla (each 22 x 234 x 60 cm). Painting indeed ever extending itself or sailing forth as itself. Beyond any imposed authority,

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seemingly beyond authorialness. For, try as we may, and knowing full well such work may be said to ‘belong’ to Daniel Dezeuze, here is an artist who has continually sought to evacuate his own subjectivity and bestow ‘poetry’ and ‘lyricism’ upon the fundamental materiality of the existing and the energy of its deployment in the modest (and often smilingly witty) hands of its servant fleeing status, prestige. The range of plastic modes thus deployed by this theoretically self-effacing artist reveals both continuity, repetition, and great and, indeed, increasing diversification. And yet a unified démarche is ever manifest, coherent, consequential. The 1975 Cinq carrés dont deux vides is made of strips of wood veneer, painted; Triangulation magenta, of the same year, where elegance vies with soberness, offers the same materiality very differently deployed; the small 1992 wood block, Sans titre, is a ‘found object’, though not in a surrealist sense, embedded with a swirl of nails and touched up with a little paint; the many 1993-4 Objets de cueillette are funkily fabricated with pieces of plastic, wood, various bits of metal and leather; the seemingly one-off 1990 Per una selva oscura, a most lovely maze-like sculpture of considerable dimensions (50 cm high, 600 cm diameter) is made of walnut-stained wood scrupulously crafted; its 1991 non-replica of the same title (Version annexe) gives us ten freely positionable metals wheels held still by small wooden blocks, each wheel 20 cm x 60 diameter; the 1992 Vie amoureuse des plantes drawings use a significant array of materials, as do the Grotesques drawings of 2000: lead pencil, watercolour, crayon, wash, coloured chalk, charcoal, pen, reed, sanguine, various inks, etc.; the 2005 Trois diptyques (200 x 70 cm) – I shall speak later of this and, at length, of Dezeuze’s drawings – offers painting on wood, alternating black ‘laddering’ and scroll-curtain-like work; the 2000 Échelle qui perle (200 x 35 x 17 cm) is made of polyethylene, glass and wood; the extensive 2002 installation of some forty works at the Hôtel de Sully, where Dezeuze also accepts the challenge of what Éric de Chassey terms a ‘dialogue with the historic elements of [the Hôtel’s] architecture, the decor and paintings of the Duc de Sully’s collection which benefit from being rehung’. The material modes involved here are many and I shall return shortly to this major exhibition. Before proceeding to discuss questions of meaning and truth that Dezeuze meditates, a discussion followed by analysis of what we may think of as major fascinations buried in his manner of


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plastic production, and, in particular, in the graphic work of La Vie amoureuse des plantes, the Papillons, the Grotesques and other ensembles of drawings, I should add a few necessarily brief observations emphasising certain modal characteristics of the samplings we have just attended to: 1: the relative austerity and soberness of Dezeuze’s choice of materials as well as his treatment thereof: there is no jazzing up of materially ‘unnoble’ work, at best a discreet deployment of chromatics both Tosatto and Javault read as a quiet joyousness; 2: the ‘literal’ displaying of the matter of painting, whilst serious and purposed, remains equally tongue-in-cheek, warmly provocative in its negation of a tradition masking means and materials in favour of pictorial illusion, a portrayal of what means and materials are not – yet such negation simultaneously negates itself in an affirmation of new and overlooked aesthetic feasibleness; 3: whilst liberation of painting’s modes of production is achieved, it yet remains dependent upon a gestural discipline, control, and indeed, re-image-ination whereby traditional representation is stood on its head and painting turns back upon itself and thus only represents itself; 4: Dezeuze’s pseudorepetitious modes within the experience of, say, the various Portes, and his shifting from, say, Portes to Échelles, or Extensibles to Objets de cueillette or Réceptacles – both reveal a desire for a contrapuntality, a playing off of Aa against Ab, just as all A’s may play off against – with, rather than against, perhaps – all B’s or C’s: a rhythmed, ‘musicalised’ (as Dezeuze himself can see it) gathering of indiv-idual pieces of similar nature, or one offering contrast and difference within a larger harmony of various ensembles materially and/or chromatically distinct but intertwined; 5: Dezeuze’s work adopts from the outset a principled practice of antigenericity: painting, drawing, sculpture fuse, refuse conventional modelling, materiality and conceptualisation:

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one can speak of a certain generic ‘extremism’, but the kind of art Dezeuze gives us lacks aggressivity, preferring regenerativeness, repotentiation, growth, an ever burgeoning, often smiling, otherness that has no need for category or limit. In effect – and Dezeuze’s writings can penetratingly and eloquently, even if a trifle inflexibly, especially in the heyday of his sociopolitically inspired theorisation –, what art/painting produces is a phenomenon beyond sayableness. Possessing form, but lacking formulatableness. Generating signifiers, but either evacuating all signifieds, or, if we prefer to see things that way, multiplying them to unspeakable and irreducible implicit infinity. Take, for example, Châssis aux clavettes rouges (1997), a large (220 x 210 cm) gray-painted wooden frame, with one vertical central strut and two horizontal ones, the upper of the two embedded with six red and symmetrically placed cotter-pins, just like a six-paned window frame without the glass. Speaking to Olivier Kaeppelin of language in the context of plastic creation, Dezeuze quotes firstly Bram van Velde (‘To be able to welcome the unknown one must be without language’), then Matisse (‘You must cut out your tongue’). Châssis aux clavettes rouges is the image/presence of itself. It depends on no interpretive gesture to explicate and complete it. Its form, texture, chromatics constitute its meaning, but the latter cannot be articulated in the way, for example, we may feel a painting by Fragonard, perhaps his famous Balançoire, or Bonnard’s wonderful Intimité, or, today, Gérard Garouste’s La Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon rouge or Martial Raysse’s Le Carnaval à Périgueux, invite us, require us even, to resort to decipherment, an overlaying of meaning upon what otherwise, we may think, is pure form, beauteous, skilled perhaps, but utterly lacking without our burrowing into a representational dimension it does not say, but which we feel we must. Dezeuze’s work refuses this game, or, if it cannot prevent totally our attempting to play it, makes us sense its infinity, the spiralling enigma of all form, texturedness and chromaticity, and, simultaneously the utter relativity of all speaking of enigma. The simpler the image, the more evident enigma’s infinity.2 Châssis, here, then, is as extraordinary a signifier as is, say, a tree or a pebble 2

Of course, all art, Fragonard’s, Bonnard’s, etc., is steeped in a poetics of infinity and ‘impossible discursivity’.


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whose signifiers lie beyond naming, in a place of truth imaginable, inventable, but not offerable as definitive meaning. Of course, we may say that Châssis speaks referentiality (wood, paint, metal, etc.), but, as with tree and pebble, to push referentiality into the realm of signifiedness, is to dream the dream of absolute meaning, of origin. If we wish to speak of meaning, for Châssis, at best we can say that it presents its questionableness, a presence that is simultaneously an absence – though generally, and significantly, a voidedness that is its own fullness, its own beauty, its own truth, unfixable, jubilatory, an unfathomable ‘isness’ of what it is, without fond. This can be argued, I should maintain, for all of Daniel Dezeuze’s works. His 1985 Moïse, two skis riveted together, forming a longish ladder-like ‘ascensional’ object (147 x 16 x 18 cm), may well toy with us via, precisely (and most exceptionally), inviting us to go down the cul-de-sac of its witty title, but clearly such a joke does not constitute a meaning. Nor, it is important to appreciate, does it imply that Moïse is nonsense or contresens, Dezeuze is quick to insist. The question posed by Dezeuze`s work, whether it be that of his Réceptacles or his Portes, or even more recently, of his Retour de Chine pastels and coloured chalk drawings of 1987-8, or, again, the various pastels of the 1997-2004 period titled Papillons – the question continually posed generates an unmeaning, if I may put it that way, which is, as he knows full well, far from any desire to institute an art of ‘sedation’, soporificalness, or of ‘therapy’, an art taking itself out of its own already vast, if compact, seemingly simple inherency. The questioning intrinsic to Réceptacles is thought’s and matter’s joint open enigmaticalness, a serious playing with the latter so that we are not inclined to reduce enigma, but rather revel in it without constraint. It is true that Dezeuze’s Intérieur à Suzhou (a 1987 coloured chalk drawing, 110 x 75 cm), as abstract as it is loosely allusive [: Dezeuze’s travels to China] and his other Retour de Chine works, like his brilliantly hued pastel Papillons, tend to pull us, we may feel, away from pure plasticity in the direction of representation, narrative. Claude Minière, in his thoughtful examination of such graphic work, argues the impossibility of art’s erasure of narrative content and, thus, a semantic dimensionality that all images incite the viewer to develop. If, clearly, faced with even non-mimetic, loosely evocative forms of domestic interiors or flitting, barely graspable movements of butterflies, we can generate free-ranging thoughts of a cultural, sociopolitical, ecological, aesthetic (etc., etc.) nature, it yet

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remains that such work does not seek to dwell upon detail, factuality, firm encoded narrative. Dezeuze’s preference is to point us towards art’s querying of its capacity for relating to what it is not. There is, in consequence here, no absolutensess of portrayal. Ephemeralness and art’s instantaneity of gesture strike us. It is an art without insistence, agendas other than those inherent in drawing. As a result, drawing continues to question its own manners of being what it is – ever, certainly in relation to the matter of what is and our perception of its enigma -, but equally ever avoiding the trap of fastidious figuration, all idea of generating message, meaning, some transcendence outside of plasticity. What, at this point of our examination of Daniel Dezeuze’s démarche and plastic production, may we add to our understanding of the various fascinations his work incarnates? I shall offer nine remarks. Firstly, central to Dezeuze’s theory and practice of art/painting is the fascination of the twinned logic/reality of void and matter, space’s emptiness and the thereness of objects, things. On the one hand the sheer if strange and beautifully delicate fullness of canvas in a work such as the Quadrillage de rubans de toile, or the enigma of material thereness of the wood veneer strips composing the Grand colombage. On the other hand, the void everywhere manifest, though clearly not so much ‘visible’ as allowing of the gaze to penetrate the void’s spatialities to enter into contact with other materiality: an ‘absence’ allowing for the perception of further ‘presence’. It is an equation everywhere appreciable in Dezeuze’s work, just as it is emblematic of his refusal of speakable, isolatable meaning: matter hemmed in by its ‘disappearance’, the enigma of space’s ‘emptiness’, the latter in turn ‘showing’, ‘setting off’ matter’s things, equally enigmatic in themselves, ‘absent’ equally in their pure unmaterial atomicalness. Secondly, and in close connection with such preoccupations, Dezeuze’s work experiences the allurement of compactness, matter’s density, its solid self-revelation that, in a sense, ‘blocks’ vision of its inner ‘essential’ structure just as it ‘prevents’ seeing of all else that it isn’t: the various 1982 Blocs de bois thus simultaneously manifest their surface, pull us towards their thickness, and, via their strange monopolising of our gaze, occult all otherness. It is no wonder that, either alternatively or in the same plastic gesture, Dezeuze so frequently cuts through density, opaqueness, thus aerating, opening, al-


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lowing the eye and the mind to perceive more largely, broadly, both physically and symbolically. The Portes are carved open, a Bloc de bois will swing open upon its hinge, the Nefs or the latticed wooden sheets structuring works like the Peintures sur chevalet (1995-8) or the many Extensibles show the tussle of material compression with the empty plenitude of air, space, ‘nothingness’. And a third obsession, which can take various forms, and which relates to these initial observations, is Dezeuze’s exploration of materials that, intrinsically, fuse matter’s self-display and aeration via a transparency that is partial, veiling and blurring though never masking or definitively occulting. The Gazes découpées et peintes accomplish this feat, showing what they are, yet, too, the otherness that is both beyond them and curiously, spectrally, part of them. One could point equally to a good deal of Dezeuze’s drawings, the Vie amourense des plantes, for example, where form clouds, muddles and obfuscates as much as it may be said to reveal; or, again, works from the Retour de Chine collection, the Intérieurs, say, or, too, ‘landscapes’ such as Cascade et rochers, a largish 1988 pastel (80 x 115 cm) with its tumbling mosaic of line and colour, or Vision à Pékin (1987), where dazzling pink and mauve space dominates what we perhaps thought was to be a clear representation of a Beijing temple and some sort of plant in the vaguest of foregrounds. The question, indeed the puzzling reality, of finitude and infinity, is a fourth element, clearly pertinent to the above, that draws Dezeuze’s attention. In his response to Olivier Kaeppelin, he writes that ‘the concepts of finite/infinite shed light upon each other’, and argues that ‘we are ever and still prisoners of that duality’. To deal with surface and support, line and form and colour, is, we have seen, to seek to privilege immanence, demystify art, evacuate its metaphysics and that panoply of significations we may wish to attach to them. But such aesthetico-sociologico-psychological equations one may in consequence endeavour to establish via such circumscription and determinacy, such stripped down ‘programming’ of plastic gesture and reality, Dezeuze clearly comes to appreciate in their ideological relativity, the degree to which ‘unmeaning’ and enigma release finitude into its otherness, its boundlessness, this in a dance of thought whereby matter cannot be contained by appearance, by a logic of pure finiteness. This understanding will become increasingly manifest as

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Dezeuze’s graphic work develops and I shall soon give a full treatment of this and especially the Grotesques and Salon noir drawings. But, in effect, one can safely argue Dezeuze’s sense of the infinite’s imbrications with the finite right from the outset. To ‘peer through’ painting’s representational illusoriness, as in his 1967 Châssis avec feuille de plastique tendue, entails a gesture endlessly and varyingly recycled in works as different as the 1972 Quadrillage, the 1979 Cinq carrés dont deux vides or the great Cube of 1997 forming, with its flèches, Per una selva oscura II – whereby the dark, dense and secret ‘forest’ of matter is both evoked as such and, à la Dante, traversed to reveal a physics beyond manifestness, an hors-limite of the broadest, unsayable kind (: space, air, light, void, etc.), beyond limit, an immeasurableness beyond representation. And, I should argue, even works such as the Réceptacles or the Objets de cueillette, in offering us play, smile, imagination, freedom of doing and being, are predicated upon a logic, an aesthetics and a philosophico-psychological sense, of the infinite at the very same time as they purport to anchor themselves in the fundamental ordinariness of the material. Fifthly, and once more, inevitably intertwined with what precedes, Dezeuze’s démarche is always drawn to what we may term the complexity of the simple, a breadth and a depth below the surface. We could again point to the Cube in Per una selva oscura II or the Gazes découpées et peintes. And then there are the Extensibles, ever variable in shape, size, available perspective, colour, this not unlike the ribbonlike wood veneer Échelles that can be hung vertically or horizontally or flipped over a couple of times or twisted about into an unrecognizable jumble of a ladder. And all of these works, like so many others Dezeuze has ingeniously devised – though beyond all desire on his part to display artistic ‘genius’ – are complexified to a point of implicit infinity as we have seen, via their piercings and aerations, their frequent funky wittiness, and their unspoken meditations on matter’s, form’s, structure’s, arguable logics and pertinencies. A sixth fascination, equally everywhere visible, is that with the orchestration of pieces into ensembles. Such orchestration may be founded upon principles of reiteration and modification, mutation of apparent sameness, or else notions – but emerging from instinct, impulse, not a practice planned down to its last detail – of alternation and contrast. Thus is it that the Portes, for example, run through their internal gamut, creating works


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that, as Dezeuze understands, ‘are imbricated in musical terms’, just as the Peintures sur treillis, he equally appreciates, dovetail, but ‘contrapuntally” with the Nefs blanches – this moreover not just formally, but also chromatically, Dezeuze seeing an important level of equivalence in the terms colour and music. Such fascination with the ‘musical’, rhythmic effect of gathered individual pieces and ensembles confronted either in harmony and relatively manifest consonance or with a greater polyphonic and even seemingly slightly discordant flair – La Vie amoureuse des plantes drawings and the sketches of the Forts et armes ‘series’, or, perhaps, the Nefs works and the Salon noir drawings – such delighted and conscious insistence points, in effect, and importantly, to a strong sense Dezeuze has of the unfinishedness, indeed, the unfinishableness, of art’s production. Despite care, even a certain meticulousness of execution, Dezeuze does not invest in an aesthetics of closure and finality. Rather is his doing, his poiein – and one can see this in his poetry also, that, say, of Dezeuze’s charming and lively Courtoises frimousses avec fleurs (2006) – predicated on the flow, the pulsing of gesture, of an action in the moment, not centred on the prestige of some perfectibility, but the pleasure of the renewable, the ever unfolding rhythmics of doing. The exhibition at the Hôtel de Sully, gathering disparate, heteroclitic works in a newly ‘musicalised’ display of a faire at once old and with wonderful new accretions (: the large and beautiful collar-like lampshades, for example, for the ceiling lights), and, simultaneously, merging such extensive work with the resident art and architecture of the Hôtel in order to create an even larger symphonisation of doing, of poeticity – we have here the work of an artist revelling in a ‘music’ known not to possess transcendent beauty of shape, tone, meaning, but lived for and in the exhilaration of its deployed rhythmics here and now. Series (though Dezeuze does not use such a term which he perhaps feels to be too pretentious for his liking) such as the Objets de cueillette or the Réceptacles allow us to articulate two further fascinations at the heart of Dezeuze’s oeuvre: on the one hand, a use of the usual at once to reveal it as such and to demonstrate the intrinsic ‘unusualness’ of the usual; on the other hand, and often embedded in such seen and shown (un)usualness, the attraction of the fanciful, of humour, irony, wit, of a certain quirkiness that can reach from, I should argue, even the very early, seemingly utterly serious Toiles ajourées

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or Châssis avec feuille de plastique tendue, through the period of the various Portes and Blocs de bois, to the Grotesques or the poetry and drawings such as those of the above mentioned Courtoises frimousses avec fleurs, which also contains the poems of Troubadour de service, of which the following is characteristic: Nous dilapidons sans compter le salaire d’Éros en caresses sonnantes et trébuchantes. (Cependant j’en mets un petit lot dans une tire-lire qu’on cassera plus tard.) On se bécote comme on boursicote, sans penser aux fluctuations. Pourtant je vois mon amour très mal coté et sa courbe descendante est celle d’un krach annoncé. Nous sommes rentiers d’amour, petits porteurs vénusiens: boursicotons à fond sur les titres hasardeux qu’Éros, dans son caprice, jette à la volée.3 I shall not dwell on the intricacies of these interwoven inclinations that absorb both the sober attention and the easeful impulses of Dezeuze’s work. Suffice it to say, firstly, that what we may deem to be usual to the point of banality, ennui or even invisibility – a picture frame, canvas, wood, raw matter in general – Dezeuze sees as richly fascinating and worthy of our intellectual and sensual appreciation, as well as a fount of potentiality allowing self and matter to interact, ‘know’ and explore one another, discover their infinitely (un)usual 3

Freely translated: We run wild through/Eros’ earnings/ in ringing and stumbling caresses./(Yet I’m putting a bit in a moneybox/we’ll break open later.)/We smooch the way we dabble on the market,/not thinking of the ups and downs./Yet I see my love has dipped in value/and its downward graph forecasts a crash./W are small investors in love,/Venus’ porters:/let’s dabble away/on risky stocks/that Eros, whimsically,/casts to the winds.


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beingness beyond equations of interpretation and congealed meaning. Secondly, the wit, the spontaneous whimsicalness that can be sensed with greater or lesser implicitness in works infused with what already in 1980 Dezeuze calls a ‘mirthful materialism’ – and of course, the poem above and others like it, and like, too, many of Dezeuze’s drawings, especially from La Vie amourense des plantes on, demonstrate that fusion of matter and mysticism, mirth, joy and eroticism that seems in harmony with the experience of Georges Bataille (again already evoked explicitly in 1980) – such whimsicalness, then, which points to Dezeuze’s sense of the deep mystery of all matter, operates as a lived mechanism, beyond pure theory – releasing us further from explication into an experience of meaningfulness-without-definition, an ‘unmeaning’ of urgent being and doing without the pretensions of absolute knowing or transcendence. This leads us to my ninth and final observation on certain of the fascinations at play in Daniel Dezeuze’s work: the linked questions of the sacred and beingness we have already seen to draw the attention of the materialist. Javault rightly dwells upon Dezeuze’s ever growing aesthetic and cultural ‘nomadicism’; Christian Prigent significantly speaks of the pull of ‘the immense, the equivocal’; and Claude Minière, in the context of the Grotesques and Le Salon noir drawings, can go so far as to argue ‘the divine capable of manifest[ing] via a withdrawal allowing “worlds” to be born and spread forth’. There is no doubt, moreover, that the graphic work permits ‘worlds’ stranger than those of the 1967 Châssis or even the Objets de cueillette to emerge: La Vie amoureuse des plantes of 1992, not unlike the 2006 drawings accompanying the poems of Courtoises frimousses avec fleurs, offers images essentially anchored by their titles only; their forms are free, caught in that liberating lack of ‘fear [before] chaos, the unnamed metamorphoses, the dance of meaning’ – that ‘dance, dance, dance, dance’ to which Rimbaud’s voyance opened his consciousness and which Dezeuze clearly recognises as central to any authenticity his drawing can hope to generate.4 Whilst I should be inclined to see such radical self-liberation as, precisely, permitting access to an immanent ‘mysticalness’ and ‘sacredness’, gestural, libi4

See Rimbaud’s ‘Mauvais sang’, from Une saison en enfer, and my chapter on Rimbaud in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (Twayne, New York, 1993).

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dinal, contemplative and ‘material’, that Dezeuze is alert to via his reading of Bataille, Dezeuze himself would seem to draw a distinction between the drawings of Le Salon noir, which, he feels, does ‘touch upon the sacred, heresies, gnosticism’, and the various Grotesques and, presumably, other graphic work such as the Vie amoureuse des plantes, the Papillons or the ‘Chinese’ works such as the Cascade et rochers pastel or the coloured chalk work, Deux idoles bouddhiques. Such preoccupations, beyond the gestural-erotic dimension of art’s would-be mysticalness, and even sacredness, must also be understood in relation to Dezeuze’s meditation of art’s ontological status. This, I should maintain, is central to our further appreciation of the earliest works where matter and void, presence and absence, weave an indivisible plastic fabric. ‘Before a painting, Daniel Dezeuze will tell Jacques Beauffet, we see being (substance) but it is in fact non-being that gazes upon us.’ This is not the place to plunge into a full ontological discussion of such a statement. I must content myself with insisting upon the yet crucial interpertinencies of 1. Dezeuze’s avowed desire to ‘preserve [in my work] mystical experience without any indebtedness to some form of transcendence’; 2. his view that void, emptiness, is not ‘inert’, but ‘an active principle’, this not only in purely visual terms, but implicitly, spiritually, in yet the most open sense of the word: that which is to do with the beingness of what is seen; 3. this beingness, equated – most mystically, moreover – with non-being, urges upon us a profound revision of the nature of matter, ‘support’ and ‘surface’, that of a physicist-cum-mystic and who sees in his plastic doing the fullest of epistemological implications. As I conclude this analysis of an oeuvre whose initial subtleties become increasingly manifest as it unfolds into those related ‘others’ that are the richly varied but integrated works of Daniel Dezeuze’s graphic – and poetic – modes, I should like to offer a number of necessarily compact remarks on the motivations of his démarche. The first of these must privilege Dezeuze’s desire to explore the largely neglected significance of matter in the art of painting, but it is an exploration that, from the outset, overflows any purely aesthetic concerns, understanding the inseparableness of the seen and the unseen, matter and ‘void’, being and non-being. In many respects, as Christian Prigent has rightly noted, Dezeuze’s work seeks not so much at all to produce works – with their implicit prestige and seeming permanence


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– as to experience, and meditate and play with, the ‘energy that comes to us from the unnameable real which [in turn] charges us with returning it to itself’. If early work such as that involved in the Coaraze collective exhibition points to a desire to deconstruct the opposition between culture and nature, to operate an ‘epistemological rupture’ painting had hitherto refused – and, in sweeter terms, equally Dezeuze’s, bring a ‘breath of fresh air’ to painting’s stuffy enclave –, such deconstruction will continue not only through works such as the Objets de cueillette and Réceptacles, but right into La Vie amoureuse des plantes and, of course, Grotesques (somewhere between Redon’s early nightmarish penetrations into his own psyche and work by, say, Twombly) or the 2006 Échelle avec poids (with its heightened finesse but, too, its connotations of basic labour and fixing). And, despite the initial and determined flurry of theory and sociopolitical ideologisations – and, of course, Daniel Dezeuze remains, like the poetphilosopher Michel Deguy, disinclined, properly so, to give up thinking seriously about his own, and others’, doing5 – Dezeuze seeks ever to privilege work over theory, the latter, as Pierre Reverdy once remarked, needing to come afterwards, not as an intellectualising formula or thesis. The desire to avoid the formulaic is matched by an instinctive determination to steer clear of an art of the purely, the avidly formal: not only does wit and irony abound, but, with them, an easily felt purposing in the direction of the sensual (the 1972 Quadrillage, for example), the supple and the subtle (the Gazes, let us say), or the chimerical or the mystical-cum-sacred (the Vie amoureuse des plantes and the Salon noir drawings). Form, by all means, but, too, all that is in excess of form. In effect, Dezeuze is ever in search of a new seeing: the 1967 Châssis launches this enterprise whose dimensions never cease to grow, ever ‘extendable’, ranging from the pseudoconceptual to the near-visionary (the Toiles ajourées, for example, to the Salon noir), from the rawness of the visible (the Blocs de bois, say) to a near-but-not-quite representationality (the Chinese Intérieurs, perhaps), to the charmingly elusive delicacy of the glimpsed (the Papillons work, for example). And always, in this desire to see afresh, an 5

Deguy has often maintained that art should be accompanied by its own theorisation, its self-reflexivity.

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equal desire to show that each gesture is a renewal, each papillon, each extensible, each échelle, each grotesque constituting a further penetration into the seeable – which, yet, is, in consequence, no more fixable, definitively to be stilled and stated, than it is independant of the very doing, fatally subjective despite theory’s ‘delyricising’ project, that buoys it up. And it is here where joy and the deep intention to maintain a fearless art of jubilation enter, determiningly, the scene of Daniel Dezeuze’s art. And it is here, too, that the seemingly outside world of matter can be understood to merge – with a fully assumed desire for such a merging – with the self’s endlessly discoverable, and increasingly explored, inner world. A world multiple, no doubt infinite, enigmatical, and in a sense, as beautifully anonymous, unnamed, as it is, intensely, inimitably (despite his protests), Dezeuze’s.

PROLIFERATION, MUTATION, PHANTASM, THE CEREMONY OF THE REAL: PHILIPPE FAVIER ‘Sly, generous, limpid and grave’ are the words Catherine Flohic used in 1986 to speak of the early work of Philippe Favier, and the man himself, sensing at once the tensions at play in what has become a prolific oeuvre of, largely, miniaturized multitudinousness, sensing yet equally qualities in the artist and his art allowing a curious and indulgent warmth to shine through the ‘shadow in the picture’. Minute figuration, intense detail and crowded surfaces – canvas disappears and yields to paper, glass,, wood, tin and so on – undoubtedly dominate, but larger works develop over the years, with, for example, Favier’s Monte Carlo Opera curtain, the 110 square-metre creation for the esplanade of the U.E.R de Sciences de Saint-Étienne. We can frequently wonder as to the equations drawn between the banal, the worthless, and the artistic proliferation and stringing together thereof. But we quickly realize that Favier’s is an art appreciating its own fragility and yet keeping faith with the very elements that may be said to produce such uncertainty. When we read the artist’s diary entry for 15th December (1994?) in his brief Betty’s (: ‘For lack of practice, the language of signs falls into disuse: to toss a drawing-room from the sixth floor today only means “I love you” to me’), we know that we are dealing with a poet living and toying, at once solemn and tonguein-cheek, with the surreal and the poetic in all of their swirling realities and virtualities. Philippe Favier is the artist offering us Capitaine Coucou depicted in the midst of his smiling amours as he journeys forth on his tiny painted tin lid; the artist, too, of the also early 1980’s mixted technique oil and collage on paper Déjeuclown S. Beckett, with all that such a tipping of the hat implies; the artist today of the exquisite Antiphonium series of ink and watercolour drawings on a set of old musical scores.1 Louise Ferrari has called Favier a bris-colleurécri-peintre, alluding to his ‘puttering about’ with endless bits and 1

See Selected Bibliography. The Galerie Bärtschi also maintains an excellent site where a good range of Favier’s work can be viewed: www.bartschi.ch.

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pieces of the real (and, of course, the mind), his ‘sticking together’ of multiple, seemingly loosely connected components, his fascination with and ongoing exploitation of language and sign, all of which constitutes his particular and original mode of a ‘painting’ so often so far from brush and canvas, from what he felt to be from the outset painting’s conventional manigances, its classic intrigues or perhaps pretentious wire-pulling. Bruno Duborgel suggests that, despite a thematics – and, in effect, a practice – of exile, solitude, dreamed escape, Favier’s drawings exist in order to ‘act out and write life’, a dailiness ever ‘tatooed with death’. If the evidence for this claim is abundant, from the early micro battle scenes to the 2001 Abracadavra works, the 2008-9 Meurtre en Saône et Loire series or the most recent Mécanique des acides (2009-10) acid-on-glass creations, yet will it be important to recognise the fervour, the perfectionism and the various manners of intense resistance to any morbidity and tragicalness that, clearly, brush against Favier’s sensitivity and consciousness before a world in which sufferings remain legion. But before examining the complexities of reigning tonalities and ‘meanings’ in an oeuvre of vast hybridization and what I shall regard as ‘ceremony’ and essentially undecodable allegory, let us turn immediately to the most strikingly particular material and modal range that characterizes Philippe Favier’s plastic gesture. The early 1980’s see the latter veer away from traditional means and very early dabblings with photography and a form of Land Art, to embrace, partly out of financial necessity, partly out of a certain skepticism in regard to traditional painting, partly out of a preference for intense focusing of attention – to embrace the rather proletarian and unsanctioned use of the ballpoint pen and a technique involving detailed drawings cut out and glued onto paper, and even walls. Champ de choux-fleurs à Chambourcy (1981) may be said to be a signature work along these lines, giving us a very small (11 x 22cm) work with its charmingly undulating field of some 200 or so drawn and cut-out cauliflower ‘figures’, blazon-like, emblems, perhaps, of the improbableness of their selection as objects of aesthetic, even ontological, privilege. Paper supports can give way to tin lids or even the inside ‘floor’ of the container – Viallat also took a liking to such available and quirky material options – which, of course, offer the opportunity to fuse the painterly gesture with some preexisting industrial markings: Italy-Italie, a 1985

Proliferation, Mutation, Phantasm, the Ceremony of the Real: Philippe Favier

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drypoint on tin lid is a case at hand, as is the rather bizarre yet utterly ‘ordinary’ numbered series of the Clou (1985), with enamelling on aluminium paper under glass in the bottom of a small (6 x 17cm) sardine tin, where the image of the nail nestles. Painting, with enamel or acrylic or ballpoint and, most recently, even photographic work, on or under glass – such material modes become frequently employed from the mid-1980’s on, at times involving collaging: the wonderful 1986 pseudo nature morte titled Asperge thus unpretentiously enamels its tiny vegetable form (11 x 15.5cm) onto glass; the 1991 Madame au beurre volant, from the Archipel des pacotilles series, conjures its whimsical implausibleness not simply from its title but also from its combination of painting on glass and collaging under glass; and the entire and compellingly strange series, Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non, presents us with small (30 x30cm) wood-framed works drawn in ballpoint with pale green acrylic under glass. Frames may become metal, as with most of the ballpoint, (various) paints and collaging onto glass works of the 2001 Comment j’ai tué Kissinger series, or disappear entirely, as with the numerous works, both early and recent, electing a purely paper support. The latter, however, may mutate from variously ‘plain’ papers to map paper (: the 2008-9 series, Meurtre en Saône et Loire, for example), to really old paper (as in the 2009 watercolour drawings, Écrevisses et architectes), to old engraved paper (: the 2008-9 watercolour and ink series, Nouveau Roubo). If it is true that, as Françoise-Claire Prodhon suggests, we can see in Philippe Favier’s wide range of plastic supports ‘a kind of spiritual errancy’ – and we should not overlook his use of slate, old school writing slates for children (: the 1995 Suite 668 is the primary example, one appealing equally to Joël Kermarrec, as we have seen) or his use of walls upon which drawn cutouts may be placed –, such an errancy or continuous and spontaneous migration from support to support (with its potential implications for the tools of drawing and painting) should not, I would argue, be held to imply an unthinking, passive and quiescent relationship with the real. Rather does it represent an openness, an availability, alert to at once material and gestural, aesthetic and symbolic values and potentials. Size and number, of course, are subtly related to such material potentials. The use of ballpoint, engraving needles and other pointed implements allows for the development of a curious admixture of detailedness, a strangely oneiric

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hyperrealism, a concentrated signing, on the one hand, where diminutive images may be set before the peering eye, and, on the other hand, a frequent multiplication and diversification of such Lilliputian figures so that the observer’s attention is often pulled in endless directions. The very early (1981-82) Place Carnot, of already near-postage stamp size (9 x 12cm), charmingly and poetically maps out in acrylic on paper the hundreds of minute elements pertaining to real place. The 1985 Bébés d’or, of similar proportions (7 x 11cm), paints little acrylic babies that fly and leap through their cutout paper space impossible to relate rationally to the pseudo scene unfolding before us with its two or three other ambiguous figures. Works such Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non or the many paintings of Comment j’ai tué Kissinger operate this tension between detailed and miniaturized portrayal and an at once proliferating and ever hybridizing production of the figures and signs portrayed. Une ombre au tableau is vertiginous in this regard, its ballpoint and acrylic forms crowding every corner of the under-glass works, so that the dizzying visual mathematics of a single painting increases exponentially as we move to the next and the next and on again, each detail demanding the eye attend to every shape, every interconnection of adjacent figures, whilst being pulled irresistibly, though impossibly, to form a larger, ever expanding coherence beyond, though still in consequence of, the remarkable particularities and minutiae afforded us. Comment j’ai tué Kissinger may not provide the busy, the frenetic and swarming figuration of Une ombre, but the finesse and funky rigour of the ballpoint drawing and, on this occasion, brilliant watercolouring, allied to collaging effects, all in the still relatively compact ‘boxed’ space (: often 31.5 x 31.5 x 6.5cm) of under-glass works that can been seen from both sides – all of this, plus names and words thus complicated via this ‘reversibility’ and, as ever, the serial nature of paintings bearing a full range of intriguing titles, makes for the familiar and richly and provocatively demanding tug-ofwar between an artistic mode requiring intense focus and one involving vast and ceaselessly mutating proliferation. Favier himself has spoken of the ‘discretion’ this endless flow of detailing of the elements of inner and outer world affords him, and, of course, we should not overlook the significant role both of the use of what Catherine Flohic terms the artist’s ‘odd, melancholy and obscure’ titles, and the serial modalities of his production which ever problematises any gesture seeking to stabilize our grasp of what and how production offers


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what it does. Flohic’s preferred example of such titling is the following: Anathème pour un crâne mordu – Hahas pour dames-coucous – et l’espoir ô vaine aigrette-Isite lassée par les airs. ‘Little poetic curtseys’, Flavier calls them. To the implications all such modes and stylings may be said to generate we shall shortly turn our attention. What we may add at this point to the above is the fact that such material and modal originalities as are Favier’s reveal and often confess certain very loose affinities with the work of a handful of predecessors and contemporaries, whilst undoubtedly marking out a territory of distinct aesthetic newness which has catapulted his work in thirty or so short years into a limelight his modest ballpoint beginnings – and continuings – did not expect to enjoy. Favier himself recognizes the impact of Paul Klee’s work: I am assuming that the early black and white, pen and ink pieces, with their superbly detailed draftsmanship, and, too, Klee’s proclivity for a certain satiricalness and grotesqueness, would have drawn Favier – as also Klee’s seeking, through colour, for a certain emotional and spiritual equilibrium, even if no transcendence offers itself. The work of Christian Boltanski Favier speaks of as having impressed his early years, and again, for Favier is not explicit, one may feel that the range of commonplace materials used, the pertinence of memory, a certain humour – one thinks of Le Club Mickey – offsetting what may be sensed to be an implicit sense of the tragical – that elements such as these would have motivated a freeness and boldness of manner in an artist open to new aesthetic and conceptual options. The work of Marcel Duchamp, too, is unsurprisingly evoked on one occasion by Favier: no doubt for its audacious indifference to established aesthetic criteria. One may see in Favier’s ballpoint quasidoodlings a residue of such an attitude – though modesty and unpretentiousness reign; and one may perhaps argue a lingering effect of the readymade in Favier’s use of supports such as business cards, musical scores, even map paper, which interact, not altogether unlike the urinal of Duchamp’s Fontaine, with the signings, the inscriptions,, the drawings by which Favier at once appropriates them, ‘charms’ them, and, ironically, heightens the rich dramas they contain, and which one can so easily forget or ignore. Favier has spoken equally, if very briefly and without any elaboration, of the pertinence for his formative years of Sixteenth-Century art: here, all is surmising: Bruegel perhaps? The

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teeming scenes Alkmaar can provide? Cranach? Ghirlandaio? Vicentino’s remarkably intricate and proliferating detailing in, say, The Battle of Lepanto? One might assume, too, that artists as distinct as Bosch, with his carnavalesque and often ironic and finely detailed works, or Henri Michaux, with his personal hieroglyphics – Favier ever remains not just a poet, nor a constant reader of dictionaries and encyclopedias (for language and image), but a collector of alphabets and signs of all sorts – have brushed against the aesthetic consciousness of the artist of Une ombre au tableau, Abracadavra and Antiphonium. And, amongst Favier’s contemporaries, though never mentioned in the occasional interviews over the years, I cannot help thinking – whilst recognizing great distinctions and originalities – of the rich interpertinencies with the work of a Gérard Garouste or the later production of a Martial Raysse: the former’s many Sans titre, both gouaches and oils, in the superb 1992 Hannover Kunstverein catalogue or the latter’s Le Soir Antoine!.2 Poet himself – the 2003 Ana, appearing with Fata Morgana, is a fine example –, Favier’s connections with other poets should be constantly borne in mind. The witty, ironic, ever thoughtful, at once spiritually and melancholically inclined Jules Laforgue figures emblematically in the inimitable Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non, the following lines from the Poèmes posthumes divers being quoted: Éternité! pardon. Je le vois, notre terre N’est, dans l’universel hosannah des splendeurs, Qu’un atome où se joue une farce éphémère.3 Laforgue has exerted a wide influence upon modern poetry, and not just that of T.S.Eliot: poets such as Queneau, with his own ludic propensities, and, though much less directly, Jacques Roubaud, would recognize in Laforgue a brilliant manipulator of language and be urged to push in new directions – Queneau’s Chêne et chien, for example, and Roubaud’s various Oulipian adventures – a writing and a 2

Catherine Flohic, in Eighty, actually presents their works together. See earlier chapters for analysis of these works. 3 Translation: Eternity! Forgive me. I see our earth is,/In the universal hosannah of splendours/But a mere atom on which some fleeting farce is played out.


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self-expression avoiding Laforgue’s blatant despondencies, turning his ironies and derisions away from sentiment towards a more buoyant wit and linguistic liveliness largely masking any residual sense of life’s ‘ephemeral farcicalness’. Both Queneau and especially Roubaud, with whom significant collaboration has occurred, notably for the 2001 P.I.L.I project for the Paris metro – both, then, have impacted in important ways upon the modes and manners of the creator of what, in his excellent essay in numbered fragments, ‘sequentially restructured upon reflection’, Roubaud calls Favier’s favierogrammes. Let me give, in conclusion of these truncated remarks on aesthetic affinities, the title of Roubaud’s essay: Le concept de ‘chien’ n’aboie pas. Le chien des Baskerville non plus. It is, of course, a title precisely and smilingly reminding the reader/viewer of art/literature of that crucial divorce between word or image and reality, the world of things and phenomena and events, a divorce that disallows and even discourages firm, rationalizing and (inevitably) reductive interpretation and thereby releases reader/viewer into an unsayableness, a silence, that yet has its wonders and even improbable upliftments. The poetry of Francis Ponge Favier has been known to briefly allude to as validating of his own ‘creative method’, this, I should argue – in the absence of any real clarification on Favier’s part – for two reasons. Firstly, the emphasis on things, their intricate specificities and ‘analogical’, (trans)mutative, ‘differential’ characteristics. Secondly, the understanding Le Parti pris des choses and other work by Ponge conveys of, once again, the gap – both frustrating and liberating – opening up between ‘the density of things’ and ‘the semantic density of words [and all images and human signings]’. An understanding that disallows absolute figuration, but, by the same token, allows for the slippage from object to obplay, as Ponge writes, and, beyond obplay, a further movement towards objoy – what Roland Barthes calls ‘the pleasure of the text’, we may say, and, for Philippe Favier, the pleasure, despite all, of text and image. In all of the above, let us remember that affinities and even occasional admitted influence or strong likings carry no fixedness or even firm material or modal demonstrableness. Rather we may speak of instinctive recognition and a sharing of art’s – and being’s – infinite availabilities. But what, then, are the reigning tonalities of Philippe Favier’s work, the emotional and psychological energies it generates and

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emits? Can it be absolutely maintained, for example, as Catherine Flohic suggests, speaking of Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non, that all is antilyrical, beyond sentiment(ality) and elegy, a gesture presumably having evacuated the self’s sensitivities before the challenges of existence, giving everything over to some pure skepticism and a poetry, too, removed from emotional content? A Mallarméan dream of sorts – though we know well that Un coup de dés is riddled through with the traces of the ‘shipwreck’ of world and self? What shall we make of the endless skulls, skeletons, the disarticulated and mutated limbs that proliferate and hang and float in isolation in their glaucous space, the breasts and genitals that obsess, the signs of torture and human ‘experimentation’, the nightmarish horrors everywhere and the handwritten jottings referencing ‘regret/longing’, untruth, vertigo and so on? With just an occasional plant or tree as if to jog our memories of other (innocent?) forms of life, of a continuity beyond death. If this is poetry, it certainly is not ‘pure’ poetry, art for art’s sake: pain, lament, melancholia, anguish seep from every form, every carefully drawn ballpoint figure. Favier’s signature may be ironic, but it silently weeps. Une ombre au tableau constitutes his most austere, his grimmest work of poetry. Jacques Chabot, though speaking largely of L’Archipel des pacotilles, sees in Favier’s oeuvre an asceticism that denotes ‘spiritual exercise’: there can be no doubt that Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non casts the darkest shadow of all over Favier’s painting and that any affirmation, any yessing to life, seems pretty well drowned out by its negation – pretty well, but not quite: art faces up to the demons that may swarm and multiply, but it persists through the angst and holds its nerve. Of course, other tonalities abound, other energies psychological and spiritual – in the broadest sense of such terms. Early miniatures may reveal battle scenes, but these are consciously childlike, as playful as they may echo with any somberness, and works such as Asperge, Champ de choux-fleurs à Chambourcy, or Capitaine Coucou, and indeed countless others from Suite 668, L’Archipel des pacotilles or the Épis d’altesse works, offer buoyancy, fun, a quirky and enigmatic simplicity that, as Favier tells Patrick Bougelet, serve up, he hopes, an ‘unpretentious but good wine’. Such an art is not one of artlessness, naiveté, unawareness; Favier confesses – as might we all – to a fundamental ‘ignorance’, but this is because the gestures, the


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forms and images that float into being in, say, the 1993-94 Précis d’égratignures series of paintings-writings-chalkings on slate boards, testify wonderfully, and in wonderment, to the obscure forces at work in all creation, its meticulous ‘scratchings’ being dedicated, moreover, to ‘Victor’s meccano set’ – and, one surmises, the endless invention such ‘unsophisticated’ material may spark in the mind of s/he who opens up to the infinite feasibilities of being and doing. Similarly, an examination of the 2001 works collectively titled Comment j’ai tué Kissinger – with component works as varyingly titled as Caravagio, Rien; Taisez-vous, J.M. Paillard; Courbet, Dieu no.2; Pinochet, Vaccaro; Général Giap, Hardy – renders clear that Favier’s art is complex, subtle, even urbane, its guile and its beguilingness emanating from an alliance of quotidian, even strong sociopolitical alertness, and a free-wheeling oneiric and phantasmagorical inventivity connected to such alertness. Paintings such as these – and let us not forget that their images are viewable and only fully appreciable from both sides of the glass on which they are drawn-painted-collaged – give us rich poetry of what Favier once called ‘parallaxis’, a poetry ever shifting its ‘position’, its ‘perspective’, in relation to the observer, offering simultaneously convergent and divergent signings and significations, a semiosis and a ‘tonality’ unstable, unanchored – in short, truly free, irreducible – in its very multitudinousness. If we limit ourselves to, simply, the references generated in the few paintings mentioned above from the Comment j’ai tué Kissinger ensemble, we see that the (still largely discreet, despite the flagrant namings: in effect, virtually no discursive elaboration accompanies the latter) insistencies and tonalities range from those we may associate with great artists, probable admiration for Vo Nguyen Giap, whose family was tortured and executed during his exile from then Indochina, and who brilliantly defended his country against the long and fruitless and terrible American invasion of Vietnam, from a seemingly excentric ‘silencing’ of the maker of pastel paints (J.M. Paillard?), a no doubt grateful nod to Laurel and Hardy and especially the rather hard-done-by and weaker of the famed comedic pair, and a probably similar acknowledgement of the prolific author (Frédéric Dard) of the adventures of San Antonio, to a clear (if, again, quite unelaborated) recognition of all that the Chilean dictator Pinochet wrought upon his people (with Western backing), to, finally, the utterly ambiguous referencings and hence tonalities in throwing out the name of Vaccaro: one of Pinochet’s torturers?

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one of the exiled Chilean medical doctors? an investigator into Pinochet’s actions? or – for, beneath Vaccaro, we see the word Napoli: any one of various important Seventeenth-Century Italian painters, Andreo? Nicola? Domenico Antonio? Discretion espouses flagrancy, in effect, in an obscuring and revealing marriage of semiotic pointings. Fundamentally all these paintings float out before us virtualities, multiple potentialities, without any explicit tone – statement of feeling and thinking before the world – being affirmed. Or, rather, all virtual tonalities overlap, asserting and erasing themselves simultaneously. There is seeming encouragement and seeming self-denigration, ontological and aesthetic. Art unveils its teemingness and at the same time can argue it offers ‘thrice nothingness’. We can sense disgust and an art reminiscent of Beckettian ‘endgame’, yet winged, implicitly angelic death-riders can mount their phantom steeds, others dance or strut forth, ever immersed in the swirl of events enigmatic in themselves and further obscured by the endless free-floating microsigns and drawings – which Favier deems to be ‘like a supplementary colour, a fifth season’ – beyond time precisely, an at once oneiric and intuitive extension-cum-meditation of the real. A kind of rich mythological figuration is fed to us. But one without manifest agenda, or, if one prefers, with an agenda that is implicitly infinite, intensely lived, but exploded, éclaté. It is, too, a figuration that, tonally, from the earliest moments of Place Carnot or Bébés d’or or the wonderful and unusually largish (105 x 105cm), though infinitely and delicately packed Un rien fait de songes intacts, du bonheur qui n’aura pas lieu et de mon souffle ici retenu dans la peur d’une apparition, through to the swarming detail of the 2008-9 ink and watercolour on map paper works of the Meurtre en Saône et Loire series or the bizarre red crayfish-skeletons painted onto old architectural paper designs of the 2009 series Écrevisses et architectes – a figuration that demands intimacy of exchange, a close viewer attention to match the meticulousness of the artist’s inscription. Tonally, over and above any conceivable melancholy or morbidity, we can sense gestural fervour, an artisanal perfectionism related simultaneously to previous craftsmanship (of cartographers, architects, printers, etc.), to the strange beingness of things that are, and to the equally strange appeal of the self’s doing in relation to all of this, as in relation to others with whom such intimacy may be shared. Complex to-


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nalities thus emerge from works such as these, or, say, from the 2009 Profils de Simon series of idiosyncratic paintings on old cards showing metal profiles. Daintiness, subtlety and scrupulous refinement vie with eccentricity, the uncanny or the fanciful. The bodily, the physical and, implicitly, the sexual are ever placed before us and what I am calling tone is so often set by the tetralogical, a preoccupation with corporeal degeneration or anomaly – even though skeletal figures may continue to creep or walk, climb or push prams, and disconnected parts can persist in affirming a presence beyond inertness: Une ombre au tableau may set the standard here, but works such as the strange yet beautiful 2003-4 black and white glass photography series titled Céreboscopie or the equally remarkable and tonally tense and paradoxical Antiphonium, continue to show their allegiance to such complex antiphonal tonal energy. If some may wish to argue that we are on the cusp of the tragic in Favier, he himself, quite rightly and most importantly, I would maintain, sees the element of humour – with its own convoluted modulations – as allowing ‘vigilance’, the tragical being all too facile an option. To render sadness, in this way, ‘illegible’, as Favier tells Debailleux in 1994, is to con-fuse tonalities, not in order, banally, to mystify, but to remain open to the full range of personal impulse and spiritual rhythm. The ‘reenchantment’ Michel Deguy speaks of from the centre of his own threnus,4 is clearly an instinctive equilibrating ‘music’ and manner in the gesture and oeuvre of Philippe Favier. Anxiety does not have to disappear for it to feel the effects of self’s subversion of it; anymore than humour disintegrates because tensions resurface. Tonality in Favier is the indefinable noplace of A folded within Z, the unsituatable space of an energy not ever limited by condition, conditioning, but ever de- and reconditioning itself.5 A tonality developing and exploiting signs that ‘promise to say nothing’, as Philippe Favier tellingly puts it to Françoise-Claire Prodhon. The hieroglyphics that is his thus never becomes clearly translatable. A given series such as Céreboscopie, or

4

See Deguy’s L’Énergie du désespoir (PUF, 1998) and À ce qui n’en finit pas: thrène (Seuil, 1995). Jean-Claude Pinson’s À Piatigorsk, sur la poésie (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2008) also bears elegantly on the issue of ‘renchantment’ or ‘disenchantment of disenchantment’. 5 I have always benefitted from Roger Cardinal’s articulation of such matters in reference to the surreal.

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works such like Les Betty’s (1990) or Chemin (1992) which involve painting or chalking or collaging onto paper or slate, can offer, as in all Favier’s major series, a vast array of blazons,6 figures, mutations, letters, words, names public and private, arrowings, labellings, numberings and so on, all constituting a swarming, spinning, swirling tonal atmosphere beyond all narrative flatness, all linear discursiveness. Let us examine a little more closely some of the implications of the appending of Favier’s signature to such profuse and whirling signings as his plastic gesture ceaselessly lays before us. To place, frequently, in the very midst of a given painting the self’s initials, PF, is clearly to situate the self in intimate and inalienable relation simultaneously to the ‘inner’, endlessly blazoned plastic world of art and to the ‘outer’, equally becoming and superabundant and brimming world from which, rationally and irrationally, intuitively and unconsciously painting’s ever shifting figurations arise. ‘PF’ is the sign of this recognition and of Favier’s assuming of responsibility for the dual, fused participation his gestures entail. Bruno Duborgel has spoken of ‘pools of dreaming, well of selfness’ in the context of Favier’s Archipel des pacotilles, and indeed the well of world and self, for Philippe Favier, ever gives and gushes. And, in so gushing, mutates and hybridizes the images of self to such an extent that Favier himself, fragmented, multiple, near-infinite, seems to float incognito through his own imaginative universe. And yet, as is evident everywhere – Caravagio, Rien, for example –, and as Catherine Flohic has emphasized, nothingness remains, in the midst of this profusion ever welling forth, one of Philippe Favier’s mantras. It is, however – and it is the very ‘logic’ of parallaxis, tension, reversibility, multiplicity – a nothingness composed of and reliant on endless ‘somethings’, a vanitas steeped in both life’s infinite detail and art’s poetical, transfigurative representation thereof. A nothingness ceaselessly spewing forth its ‘somethings’ that simultaneously confirm and deny the logic of both negation and affirmation, death and creation. There are painted scenes in the colourful Ether d’Ambonil series showing skeletal figures traversing inner landscapes, braving all imaginable conditions; there are ghost-like figures that skip; skeletons picnic away, dance, make music, hunt, marry, push 6

A term Titus-Carmel is fond of using for its athematic, elastic echoes, its capacity to speak of pseudo-symbolic obsessiveness.


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prams, whether circumstances are pastoral or desertic. And there is the persistent little red tractor going about its daily tasks. An art sardonic, ironic, melancholic, perhaps; but filled with the ‘counter-irony’, if I may express it that way, of an endless doing and coping: life’s, art’s, self’s. The works of Philippe Favier may be deemed enigmatic, hermetical even, but, of course, their uncertainties, their carefully detailed unknowableness stem from Favier’s refusal of closure, a refusal bearing witness to his own unknowing. Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non some may feel casts a blatant negatory shadow over positive interpretations of incarnation. But, I should strongly maintain, there is nothing categoric and absolute in Favier’s plastic gestures. The ‘Yes No’ of the latter series’ title would indeed seem to cast shadow upon shadowiness itself. Speaking of Abracadavra, Duborgel argues that ‘being in the world [equates to and results in an art where dominates] a beingness in a rebus whose meaning leaks away’. Many of Favier’s works offer the appearance of a maze, a complex amassing of avenues or tiny trails of thought and imagination: his use of map paper and other schematic supports suggests a ground upon which all manner of articulation and hypothesis may be laid, yet without the latter providing any conclusive determination of the dramas seen or imagined upon such a ground. Puzzlement leads to further puzzlement. Meurtre en Saône et Loire is a kind of blueprint for all reflection on the why of death, its logic, its ‘origin’, its purpose; but the series does not close the detective’s inquiry: it is inquiry, provisional, a toying with image, thought and discreet, almost parenthesized feeling in relation to the ‘violence’, the seemingly dramatic rupture all dying – for the component ink and watercolour paintings, many exquisitely, now teemingly, now sparsely drawn and structured, do not spare us skeletal figuration – may be said to entail.7 But puzzle remains – all over the map, with or without map paper. Decipherment is not Favier’s speciality and thus, to even describe many of his works is a more or less impossible task: if, still, with Meurtre, painting #1 manifestly defies all coherent description with its amazingly intricate shattered mosaic of image and lettering, painting #4, though at first glance a pallid map with just two 7

One could maintain that Meurtre ‘murders’ murder, ‘kills’ death, just as Comment j’ai tué Kissinger reveals how existential depression can be symbolically overcome.

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blue-leaved trees, suddenly brings into focus, as we look more closely and ‘intimately’, a swarming, proliferating array of ever so lightly inked human and animal forms, ghostlike, half-visible, between presence and that ever lurking ‘nothingness’ imprinted on Favier’s psyche, forever tussled with like a dog with a bone. In a universe, Favier’s here, where the indescribable and the undecipherable, the discernable and the yet still profoundly puzzling, prevail, it is fairly certain that the sense of things we may have along with Favier himself will be polarized, contrastive, binarised, even though all is gathered, interlocked, synthesized within a single work or series, and, finally, the entire oeuvre. Take the 1984 Déjeuclown S. Beckett, for example, which, undoubtedly in appreciation of Beckett’s own tonal contrasts and energies, offers us a dancing line of tiny figures with their bouncing balls barely distinguishable from bulbous heads: we have plunged into at once confusion, beguilement, delusion, ‘unplay’, and (yet) energy deployed regardless of the meaning of one’s actions, blind continuity. Or there is the 1983 Sans titre showing two double ranks of primitive warriors, caught not only in the improbable but profoundly human incongruities of living and killing, but also in a portrayal of them not rendering absolutely clear (partly due to the minuteness of the 75 or so figures depicted) whether the two ranks are fighting in opposition or together. Incongruity thus becomes a masked ball of interpertinence. Ambivalence we can fully understand to involve a coupling of inseparables. Play and ‘unravelling of play’ (déjeu) fuse as they are gathered into the interlacement of their apparent and rationalized difference – a difference in effect deferred , constructed by the logically categorizing mind, deconstructed by the mind’s confessed unknowing, its refusal of any easy gnosis. What ends up reigning in such works, in, too, the recent ink and watercolour on glass and ink on wood series Vous n’êtes pas d’ici (2007) – each painting a complex amalgamation of framed micropaintings – and indeed throughout Favier’s entire oeuvre with the ever becoming modes of its unifiedness, is, via this deferral of definableness, conviction and absolute statement, a form of meaning that offers honest equivocation, a vacillation that is a recognition of com-pli-cation (a folding together of A with Z, as I suggested above, of A with all other ‘letters’, alphabets and signings) and, hence, the ceaseless, ever open continuity of


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meaning: mean-ing as all that is or might be said or done, made, with all that is. To detail, to miniaturise, to – oddly enough – offer definition of the indefinable, is, in effect, to place art, and the self, at the very centre of the paradox of all human saying and imaging of the world and self’s experience of it. Let us think, for a moment, of the Ether d’Ambonil acrylics, with well over 100 paintings to a series where each piece presents delicate and often finely drawn and copious detail, or of the Vous n’êtes pas d’ici where almost every work of the series is composed of between 10 and 21 small paintings (31.5 x 31.5cm) or a slight fusing together of a few of these painted squares, and, in addition, each micropainting provides (very largely) intricately drawn and interlocking strange white islands of dreamed or lived existence, their global title raising, of course, the fundamental issue of being, its ‘location’, that arguable mystery the poet Heather Dohollau hints at in affirming ‘What we are not / What we are not / Is what we are’. Such proliferation and pseudosynthesis – we never can determine what the total of the parts actually is – as Philippe Favier’s work produces could, idly, be thought to be plastically verbose, long-winded, ‘longimaged’, as it were: but this would be to misunderstand two important things: 1. just as Rodin’s entire oeuvre – sculptures, sketches, everything – offers over one million pieces, so Favier’s work is a transcript of a life’s doing, thinking, poiein, the multitudinousness of its moments, its impulses, desires, obsessions and so on; 2. such ceaseless ‘crystallisations’ of the self’s relation to the world, as Michel Guérin calls them, via their simultaneous endless errancy and their generation of self-contained microscenes, may be said to lead to a form of saying (of the world) that is synonymous with an unsaying, a non-saying. The latter, however, we can see not as a denial, but as a continuity of perception and speaking – say-ing in harmony with the unending continuity of meaning, mean-ing, of which I have spoken. In this way, ‘verbosity’ is, equally, taciturn, laconic, succinct, compact. In this way, as a Gérard Titus-Carmel might argue, silence reigns supreme in the midst of all that is said and imaged. What I am calling the errancy of plastic production always therefore contains ‘error’, a deforming/reforming of that ‘truth’ which careful, meticulous application may have been thought to target. But art as ‘untruth’ is, equally, an inadequate articulation of Favier’s gesture. Errancy is not so much a

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long list of painted errata one after the other, but rather, each time, and collectively, the artist’s best shot at truth. But, of course, a truth ever microfictionalised, fabulously fabled, filled with imagos, the masks of all thinking and articulation of self and world. Jean Arrouye has suggested that Favier’s is the work of a moraliste, given his (indulgent rather than vitriolic) exposure of the elements of existence and art as kitsch, pacotilles – he is thinking, of course, of L’Archipel, but his argument has generalizing proportions. Whilst one can appreciate this culturally binding view, Favier remains, to my mind, beyond all reduction, even of this order. All ‘narration’ generated is virtual; all meaning is suspended; unknowing rules the day and overrules all self-interpretation. Parables remain at best pseudoparables, allegory ever pseudoallegory. To compare the work of Philippe Favier with, say, Gérard Garouste’s Kezive ou la ville mensonge or L’Ânesse et la figue is to realize that, despite the enigmatic and eccentric openness of such works, their point of departure is quite particular, admitted, discussed, these works, for Garouste, being the place of meditation of such particularity. Similarly, though differences strike us powerfully, the many boîtes of Danièle Perronne or even her remarkable paintings such as Numéro 1 or Totem, whilst again not offering fixity of thinking, firm emblematicalness of its images, nevertheless construct themselves with a certain spiritual and intellectual impetus her oeuvre seeks to wrestle with beyond all ludic inclination. Capitaine Coucou, on its sardine tin support and its image of the smiling sailor lying with his presumed fabled woman-in-port is, indeed, something of a throwaway image on a castaway’s island. What does it narrate to us?: nothing we can vouch for, finally, its subtext lost with the sardines consumed. No pedagogy can we identify, unless it is that of the desirability of doing something rather than nothing, even if the something may, as we have seen, be deemed pacotille and 3 x rien. Une ombre au tableau, for all its skeletons, mummies and nightmarish mutant forms, plunges us into the silence of its pure allegorical virtuality. Mécanique des acides (2009-10) may be a series of self-reflexive ‘commentaries’ on its own fabrication (drawing with acid on glass), or could it just be evocative of the social protest rap music of the French group Rage mécanique?: the fine, intricate and pallid traces left on the black glass surface seem to offer no corroboration of such feasibilities as they urge us to appreciate other factors and


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acidic microjottings finally either barely legible or disappearing into the infinite vortex of unfathomable, uncongealed blazoned enigma. And as the Ether d’Ambonil paintings unfold before our wondering and searching eyes the extraordinary and vast fable of their psychical errancy, we sense increasingly that, at best, our own questioning mirrors that of the artist and that, in the midst of all the showing and imaging before us, we yet – profound paradox – experience the strange ‘invisibleness’ of what is seen.8 Certain works from the Comment j’ai tué Kissinger series, such as Pinochet, Vaccaro or Mao, Moshe Dayan, may indeed be seen to generate sociopolitical fervour, and indeed have done so with certain viewers; but to examine the full detail of such paintings, and especially the many others of the collection, is to realize Favier’s art is in a rare and free mode of non-commitment, of deflation of discourse rather than its inflation, of (self-)liberation from ideational fixity rather than attachment to the ceaseless flow of ideas that pass through the mind – but are not an integral part of our deeper being, obscure though it may be. It is no wonder, then, that the art of Philippe Favier does not seek to distinguish in any radical way between reality and fiction: we know no more what the real is, the purpose and meaning of its multitudinous and hypercontrastive nature and eventuation, than we know why and how our thoughts, our phantasms, our dreams develop, what they represent in relation to our being and what we perceive to be the real. The small wood and collage painting on glass of 1992, L’Oeil, utterly enigmatic with its faint, half erased scribblings, its tiny centrally featured, cocooned yet shrivelled childlike form reclining against, perhaps, a rock, its potted (artificial? – of course artificial!) tree, a golden ring floating free – L’Oeil seems the perfect emblem of sight’s capacity, not to see absolutely, but only to create a seenness according to profound relativities, swirling intuitions, wondrous if ever groping sensitivities. Such seenness/unseenness can reveal itself in one-off creations such as L’Oeil. This, however, as we know, is not Philippe Favier’s favoured manner of fabrication, although, of course, it inserts itself into what, in conclusion, I shall call the unending parade and ceremony which his art inscribes. The series is, as we have seen, the ideal structure enabling such (self-) explorato8

Éric Chevillard sees here a visibility that offers no ‘key’ as to what is seeable.


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ry performativity and theatre to deploy itself. So is it that L’Archipel des pacotilles strings together the fragments of such exploration of self and world; so is it that the works of Comment j’ai tué Kissinger bring together, circus-like, the brightly painted and costumed ‘acts’ of Pergolese, Laurel and Hardy, Gandhi, Fra Angelico, Darry Cowl, Melina Mercouri, Steve MacQueen, Pascal, Dieu, Xenakis and so much else: they circle their brief arena, flash the myriad glitter of their moment upon the stage of the mind, never cohering any more than the sight of a hundred people or phenomena glimpsed as we walk through a crowded street can grasp anything other than the astonishing and richly diverse, inconsistent, hybrid, ever mutating patterns of their parading by us – as we parade by them. Nouveau Roubo (2008-9), an ever finely drawn ink and watercolour series on old engraved cards depicting designs for wooden structures, constitutes a moving, serial place of such ceremonial yet ludic performativity. Skeletal forms of all sizes, along with the occasional dog, leopard or polar bear, swing, slide, hang, climb, inspect or simply loll about, everywhere crowding the architectural space of the engravings. Individually and collectively, Favier’s works roll out a pageant of mortal human doing, a theoria – a procession-process-proceeding, without theorization – as seriously and focussedly ritualistic as it is consciously whimsical, quizzical, droll. Works like Antiphonium, Profils de Simon, Meurtre en Saône et Loire, for example, also, truly are what Bonnaval has termed ‘palimpsests [of] unsayable emotion surging forth’. They are predicated on a fusion of system and capriciousness, the ordered and the orgiastic, the experience of the real and a ceremonialising toying with its deeply unfathomable, at once exhilarating and disturbing, abundance – which can yet be lived as absence. Ana is the title of a short book of poems Philippe Favier published in 2003. Ana: collection of notes, witticisms, etc., pertaining to one’s life? Ana: name of ‘She who far from here in the other black river where it is always late’?9 Ana disallows in countless ways a settling of the very unsettlingness its poetry generates. ‘Je vague, Favier writes: Je vague, je connote et me perds; j’accoste où il manque la terre et il manque la terre. 9

This text is given in red and interspersed with the black texts of the (other) poems.


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Une rivière à deux bras m’apporte des on-dit. Je rebrousse et m’appelle et loin je m’articule, je m’écorce me plante, m’attelle et m’inouis. Dans le vacarme de ces chants d’oiseaux, à la rescousse de personne, je me fais ce que la la solitude.10 PhilIppe Favier’s art: an art of the self’s solitary rite of passage towards a dreamed, half-smiling and most mortal intimacy. Nouveau Roubo and Antiphonium continue today to achieve such an intimacy-beyond-salvation, whose other name is poetry. Or ballpoint painting. A poiein, an articulation, where astonishment drowns out hearsay, where ceremony of being and doing tussle ceaselessly with what would deny them.

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My translation: I wander, I connote and am lost;/I draw close to where no land is/and no land is.//I backtrack and call out to myself and far away/I find articulation, shed my husks, plant myself down/go to it and astonish myself beyond belief//In the din of bird-/song, saving/no one, I become what/solitude.

THE ART OF WAR AND PEACE: DANIEL NADAUD In passing from the work of Philippe Favier to that of the final artist I have the opportunity to give thought to in this book, it is worthwhile reflecting upon the relative constancies of artistic production as well as the endless shiftings and revampings such continuities involve. Gone, in the work of Daniel Nadaud,1 is the use of ballpoint and ink; yet pencil remains an essential means, as does the print of small edition books. Gone, the obsessive use of recycled supports – tins, lids, cards, maps and the like; yet recycling remains a powerfully centrally figuring component in Nadaud. Gone is Favier’s teeming microscopic detailing, though Nadaud’s gesture ever retains a fine meticulousness and orchestration. Gone, too, those series of which Favier is enamoured for the opportunity they offer to work through to ‘exhaustion’ a particular modeling of compulsive consciousness, this moreover in fine counterpoint to the ‘thematics’ of recycled, already serried supports;2 yet, in Nadaud, there remains the pursuit of particular aims with a variety of interrelated materials and preoccupations – whereby seriality moults into simple interconnectedness. Gone, equally, after Nadaud’s intitial work exhibited in 1974 at the Galerie Durand in Paris, is Favier’s continuing commitment to painting; ever yet remain, however, richly original, foundational, yet seemingly oddly throwaway – never acknowledged as essentially conjoined with the emerging sculpture/object – the act of drawing, a constant ‘memory’ of painting’s depth of purpose and hope, and those colouring albums that Nadaud has created on the basis of his own unusual, if modest, almost self-effacing graphic vision. Gone, finally – I shall stop here, though interpenetration and transformation assume many other forms –, that special Favierian fascination with alphabets, words, signs, signature; yet does Nadaud’s strong sense of the power of language reveal itself in his titles, his delight in book ‘illustration’ and fabrication, 1

See Selected Bibliography. A personal website will be of use: www.danielnadaud.com. 2 The idea of ‘self-exhausting work’ is also significant in the thinking of Gérard TitusCarmel: see my chapter in Contemporary French Art 1.

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as well as his noticeable attention to the anchoring and referencing of the plastic. Let us take a look at a few works to obtain an initial sense of the originalities of Daniel Nadaud’s plastic gesture. Contorsion, for example, or, say, Lance-pique, both of the 1987-88 period, hesitate between object and sculpture. Both, despite their complex fabrication – steel, bronze, copper combine with the use of wood, pvc, stone and a little paint – and their somewhat precariously towering size (180cm and 175cm, respectively), contrive yet to offer standing sculptures/objects, exquisitely and improbably balancing on the tiniest of bases. Both works are at once elegant, graceful, and quirkily enigmatic, ludic. They merge the energies of care, precision, justesse, and the phantasmagorical, the spontaneously intuitive, a pure indifference to applied and rationalisable purpose. Contorsion and Lance-pique may be seen to ride a line between the surreal, with its pseudoagendas of dream, the unconscious, the unavowed, the antirational, the ‘morally’ liberated, and the residual lure of an aesthetics that Breton would have us believe surreality eschews in its preferred and deep fascination with ‘the real functioning of the mind’. Both pieces suggest the tensions of the claims of phantasm, impulsiveness, mental disponibilité, on the one hand, and, on the other, harmony, equilibrium, fragile and menaced – even menacing (with their sharp, pointed, potentially piercing pinnacles) – though they may be: their respective titles hint, perhaps playfully, perhaps with more painfully ironic subtexts, at life’s and art’s complex realities: the ‘twisting’, de-/re-forming of plastic creation; but, too, existence’s ever possible ‘knottedness’, its disfigurings and its aggressions – preoccupations Nadaud will not entirely shake loose in the years to come. The 1995 Coin du pêcheur goes some way towards what Michel Deguy has termed the imaginable ‘reenchantment’ of our being-in-the-world, taking art outside, into a ‘secret garden’ and offering a semi-circle of long red arching fibreglass fishing rods whose lines converge and are hooked to an object buried in the lawn.3 The overall effect is one of airiness and slenderness, a finesse yet earthy in its evocation of rural recreation and a gracefulness in harmony with that of thoughtfully tended gardens. The object to which the eighteen fish hooks are attached, however, turns out to be 3

The work is subtitled Jardin secret 1.

The Art of War and Peace: Daniel Nadaud

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an empty Second World War shell case, lodged in an earth that saw such bombs rain down upon it. Aesthetic transcendence, certainly, charm, daintiness even; but, too, an unspoken, uncommented trace of the violences, the un-beauty of only fifty years prior to the making of this Coin du pêcheur in a now quiet haven. In the mid- to late 1990’s Daniel Nadaud begins to offer us works drawing upon his increasing consciousness of the tensions the rural France of Mayenne he now inhabits may be said to represent and live. The 1999 Fin des Gaules is a perfect case in point. It is worth quoting Nadaud’s own detailed description of the piece as finally ‘sculpted’ (and also frequently drawn): ‘A domestic type of cart, one of whose wheels having especially suffered and been patched up / a carpenter’s axe tied onto a red arm of a horse cart / a particularly sharp hook hafted into a dead pear-tree branch / a triangulate construction of undressed wooden supports treated with carbonyl, a sickening smell / six delightful wooden school set squares / five bamboo fishing rods, one being very light, made of composite materials / (presented for the first time in the Chapelle du Genêteil, in the Château Gontier, JanFeb-Mar 1999)’. Raw or found, ‘gleaned’ materials are thus recycled, collaged together, as it were, but with scrupulous consideration typically given to their assembly. The ordinary, everyday elements of working rural life are yet not left to reveal the simplicity of the latter, but are pulled out of their comfort zone into a place of unease, a mode of being of the unheimlich. For Nadaud’s Fin des Gaules is not pure play. Its axe and its protruding hook make of a farm cart a chariot of war, admittedly smallish (28 x30 x 480cm) as war engines go, but not to be handed over to the children. Domesticity thus weds aggressivity, safety melds with danger. And, of course, the title, though witty – ‘The End of the Gauls’, but, too, the end, the final state, of long thin poles, switches, fishing rods – yet cannot mask that elegiacal tone, that tonality of loss and endgame (as Beckett might say) investing much of the work of this period. As with the bomb shell of the Coin du pêcheur, La Fin des Gaules manifestly roots itself in the realities of the twentieth-century wars fought on French soil, wars marking a violent end to (supposed, mythical) rustic and agricultural serenity and harmony. An end, forever, perhaps, to the old Gallic France as we knew it or dreamed it. This said, however, a work such as the 2003 Oraison-cloche, installed in the Collège Marcel Duchamp, Château-

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roux, may be said to offset the somewhat sobering effects and manners of La Fin des Gaules. Its one hundred steel bells, reminiscent arguably, seen in a rural context, of those adorning the necks of farm cows and goats, plus its twenty berceuses of similar cultural resonance, all hanging from a high ceiling, delicate, unassuming, beautiful in the purity of their orchestrated gatheredness – such a massed, symphonic creation clearly reveals an ever maturing and complex consciousness on the part of Nadaud not just of sociopolitical factors long at play in the region of Europe in which he resides, but also of art’s modal and material richness, ever open to new thinking, new deployment. In effect, the manners and materials explored by Daniel Nadaud show what Claude Minière has termed, and this as early as 1986, ‘iconic freedom and technical diversity’. Woods and metals of all kinds, ceramics, rubber, glass fibre, bone and horn, found objects or parts thereof, pen, pencil, paper, plexiglass, rope and string, stone, paint: implicitly infinite is the matter out of which Nadaud seeks to fashion the objects/sculptures rearing up from a fertile imagination both grounded in experience and ever reconceiving its pertinence and potential. That Nadaud himself alludes to the heteroclitic impact upon his sensibility of artists such as Redon, Arcimboldo and Fahlström confirms the impression we have of distinctly diverse affinities: if Nadaud does not give himself modally to what Redon’s Les Yeux clos or his Sommeil de Caliban represent, we can surely sense throughout his oeuvre the working and mulling over of the unconscious, a dipping into the power, at once light-filled or darker-toned, of matter’s unbridled symbolics. Arcimboldo, famed for his ‘portraits’ of the seasons, his ingenious fusion of subject and object, the human and the matter of human fascination, in paintings such as Jurist or Vegetable Gardener, once again seems modally remote from Nadaud’s plastic gesture, except that he too is ever at work fusing, compositing, doing and thinking at least two things at the same time. As for Fahlström, his own diversity matching that of Nadaud, one could naturally point in particular to the wonderful and yet quirky suspended sculptures to which he has given himself. Such affinities, I stress, are only elliptically perceptible, just as those we might seek to track down in examination of, say, Barry Flanagan’s fanciful Hare and Bell or Drummer, or, again, Tatiana Trouvé’s enigmatic sculptures/objects Absorption or


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Rock – work, artists, of which Nadaud equally and understandably, can speak in appreciation of the energy they incarnate and the funky, improbable gracefulness they generate. Looking more freely, beyond Nadaud’s own indications, we could point to echoes of Miró and the surrealist phase of Giacometti’s creativity in the early sculptures/objects such as Contorsion, the 1993 Mobile féroce, or again the witty and charming Sans tambour ni trompette. The finesse and gracefulness, along with the darker reminders of human folly, in sculptures by Bernard Pagès such as La Dépenaillée or Le Dévers aux falbalas and his Pal aux vis or the Pal aux anneaux, these too would surely enter the consciousness of a Nadaud capable of giving us exquisitely though differently harmonious balancing acts such as that offered in L’Ancêtre a la peau dure (with its tall branch anchored in the smallest of metal bases and its slim, phantasmagorical wire and thorny upper pseudobranchings demanding the most delicate of engineered equilibriums) or the numerous drawings of half-real, half-satirically fantasized pistols and other alarming (pseudo)weaponry of his colouring books awaiting the accompanying gesture of the maturing child. Such tensions and hybrid modalities as may be on display in Annette Messager’s Les Piques, for example, no doubt have impacted loosely the imagination of Nadaud, and no doubt the ghosts of Schwitters, Picasso and Duchamp inhabit a corner of the mind of that arch bricoleur, recycler and genial inventor that is Nadaud. And, of course, the personal notes drafted in the early 1970’s reveal the distinct pertinence of Claude Viallat’s work and liberal theorizing in Nadaud’s formative period as he becomes aware, not just of the materials, the supports and ‘sur-supports’ of plasticity, not just of the effect of the ‘final spectacle’ of art, but of the fact that, for the artist, work is ‘creative work itself, constituting [art] apart from its final spectacle, [which is] decidedly secondary’.4 We shall have occasion to examine further notions such as this. Suffice it to say here that, from the outset, Nadaud’s connection to other artists and art forms is at once a deeply thinking one and goes far beyond questions of aesthetics into the realm of an ontology conceived in the broadest of terms. Whether the final plastic product is placed in the space of gallery, museum, barn, chapel, or outdoors where the wind, sound, play of natural light, the infinite mul4 The copies I have from Daniel Nadaud reveal no publication details, nor have I unearthed any to date.

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tiplication of sur-support and, thus, mise en scène generate ceaseless shifts in the viewer’s sense of the relation of art to world, to what Bonnefoy has called ‘presence’, it remains that, for Nadaud, art’s agenda is not folded back upon its formal, decorative, stylistic prestige, but, rather, endlessly open to meanings at once obscure and luminous to do with one’s being-in-the-world and one’s doing, one’s action and meditation in relation to this beingness. ‘Tension, elasticity, the very form of combination’, Daniel Nadaud writes, elliptically, in his 1972 personal musings under the heading Viallat. But, while we can think through such jottings in terms of the visible anatomy of art’s surface design and orchestration, the stress and ease that characterize the shape and colour of art’s structurings and combinatory effects, it is important to appreciate equally the pertinence of such language as applied, beyond sheer surface and architectonic relationships, to the implicit discourse of being that may – and, I should strongly argue in the context of Nadaud’s oeuvre and conceptualizing thereof, does – accompany, complete and deepen and give ethical and spiritual meaning to a forme that, without such a fond, would remain an empty shell, a visibleness with no vision. Works such as the 1999 Paradis heureusement perdu (with its plant imprintings, with paint and drawing thick-glued onto wood and a white cobra skin) or the 1999 Corde destininée à refaire l’histoire et fourche pour la ramasser (with similar elements of fabrication, plus rope, hook, and three-pronged pitchfork) or, again, the equally pointedly titled Non… (2000) (with, again, similar creative means, plus a school ruler) – all such works reveal an artist extremely and simultaneously conscious of the delicacy of visual configuration and the deeper purposing underpinning and, as it were, authenticating, validating and ontologically rooting such configuration. The grace of the 1989 L’Enfance de l’art cannot fail to strike us, its solid and rounded wooden base sprouting the finest arching steel wire crescent with its two pieces of bone modulating the funky, slightly dislocated curvature. Such a sensitivity to line and volume and material texture show an artist at the height of an instinctive aesthetic consciousness that can be seen in so many plastic modes: one could point, for example, to the large (160 x 120 x 270cm) Porte-lignes (d’intérieur) with its long fibre glass rods curving far away from their two-panel fanned wooden base, itself tilted and anchored by the feet of two of the five rods which, improbably, support


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one huge set of stag antlers; or, form ever pursuing its quest for new subtlety, a new ‘truth’ of beauty, the delightfully delicate 2000 installation of Maison mère (troupeau) in the Parc de la Courneuve, with its pale green fishing nets hung along with 150 cattle-bells some sixteen or seventeen feet high above the ground amongst the garden’s tall trees. Valabrègue has spoken of Nadaud’s ‘balancing acts sought in extremis’, and it is true that there is so frequently, in the very midst of a harmony and a poise that offer adornment, elegance and charm, a residual sense, less of architectonic precariousness than of a fragility metaphorical, essentially existential. Whilst this tension uniting grace and a degree of edginess, even rawness, an anxious querying of human doing and being, is not always manifestly at play, as it is with Porte-lignes and L’Enfance de l’art, which speak implicitly of death (: bone, antlers), we should not overlook the fact that art’s own delicacy, its intricate and intimate private gesture, clearly constitutes a phenomenon of the utmost brittleness and frailty when set against the dominant criteria and modes of being and doing of the day – indeed, any day. Maison mère (troupeau) powerfully yet silently exemplifies this as it raises aloft the elements of its beauty in a world paying only marginal attention to such poetry. The disparateness of art’s grace is certainly most visible with Nadaud’s creations: wit and irony in their titles may seem to detract from a ‘seductiveness’ thus undermined and, perhaps, as Patricia Brignone writes, ‘illusory’; a certain tenderness we may feel is attached to Nadaud’s caressing of agricultural life’s hard-won dignity finds itself locked together with more ‘acidic’ and ‘darker’ tonalities, as with La Fin des Gaules, or other works such as the 1997 Naufrage or the 1993 Oisiveté tranchante with its ‘idle’ but ‘cutting’ assembly of wood, horn, hammer handles; the inventive, lyrical structuring of works like Tête-pelle (1996) or the complex ensemble of La Gricole (1996) is countered, as so often, by that poetics of unspoken hazardousness, perilousness as well as the material rawness and brokenness they may display. Grace, here, is never pure. It seems like a lost paradise at best, a dream. Les Attributs de l’Assomption (1994) toys with this notion, giving us the impossible elements (two small steel wheels and a wooden ladder going nowhere too evident, both pieces bound to a round compressed wood piece) of an elevation purely theoretical: spiritual ascension become material,

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grounded, plunged into minimality and humour. The relatively small (114 x 70 x 15cm) 1993-94 Fallacieux méandres, on the one hand a charmingly sinuous creation of curling wood, tin and leather, belies its grace via its pure ‘fallaciousness’, its perhaps self-consciously idle, toying self-indulgence in a world conceivably perceived as at once more serious, even if absurd. L’Entrave (1994), similarly, though we may view it as a boldly raw but still graciously harmonized melding of wooden billiard table legs, rough-hewn fir planks, large tractor tire (‘worn and smelly’), an old, ‘tired’ saw blade and patched-up bread shovel, yet the ingenious beauty and witty, improbable comeliness of its assembly are dashed, ironised and literally presented as collapsed, broken, crushed under their own significant weight and size (160 x 70 x 590cm). Grace and charm, simplicity and inventiveness, indeed art itself, at the very moment of their self-affirmation, come up against ‘hindrance’, ‘obstruction’, ‘constraint’, ‘blockage’. Art’s entrave placed alongside, indeed fusing with, the many entraves of everyday existence. Implicitly. The art of Daniel Nadaud, as we will have grasped, is equally, and importantly, an art of recycling. To reuse bits of wire, furniture, bone, rope, netting, bells, tires, farm implements and so on, is to engage in a modeling and a constant remodulation of the endless bits of the real, of the earth, of things at hand. Nadaud is not an ecologist in any normal sense of the term; rather is he a philosopher, a philosopher-poet of the symbolic depth of what is, the things that are, and what can be done with pieces, fragments, the discardedness, the brokenness or ‘exhaustedness’ of our being. Such an art and arguable ethics of recycling involves the taking up of the fatigued and the collapsed and offering various forms of reinvigoration, patching and renewal, whether it involves the rough remodeling of, say, La Fin des Gaules or L’Entrave, the wittier, if often conceptually tensional reconstruction of the early sculptures/objects such as Lance-pique or the 1989 Aliment louche (with it seamless elegant bonding of wood base, branch-like column, its snaking wooden excrescences, nail and tin ladle with egg-like shell), or, again, the redeployment of old cattlebells amongst other items such as fishnets, themselves given new life and pertinence. Recycling, too, in addition to bringing about, via such grafting and ‘propagation’, as Valabrègue has called it, something of an imagined reunification of what we may regard as irreconcilably


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distinct, divided, also may be said to recuperate the forgotten, transforming oblivion into memorialisation – as in, say, Nadaud’s Tétralogie laborieuse (which gathers together various individual pieces such as L’Entrave, La Gricole, Nerf des Der [with its oak barrel stand, two metal arms, sharp pitchforks, large laurel branch, substantial hemp netting, etc.] and other pieces), and which, as is generally a principle with Nadaud’s work, manifestly or implicitly sings the labour and rough creativity of farm workers, traditionally dear to a land and a people now, as elsewhere via the exodus to cities and depersonalizing industrialization of agricultural life, less sensitive to what such life has represented. Recycling shifts, transmutes in the midst of its reminiscence, its often odd mixture of honouring and smiling or more fervent irony. Disaffectedness, indifference – the offshoots of discarding and abandonment – thus, with Nadaud, are countered by what he calls an ‘affectivity’ he finds it difficult, and no doubt undesirable, to avoid. To look, not simply at works such as those of the Tétralogie laborieuse, but, too, at the drawings of Liquider, with its moving text by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel accompanying hybridized and entangled guns, phantasmagorical war weaponry cobbled together out of farm and domestic materials, menacing and nightmarish machines and objects poised to lacerate, explode, murder – to gaze upon such multiple works (: the drawings are numerous) is to plunge, now more subtly, now more flagrantly, into what a 2007 work combining Bernard Noël’s texts and many more astonishing drawings terms ‘delicate disaster’.5 Thus, yet, is it that even intense anguish, terror, horror are recycled into play, humour, the caress art may afford the most disturbing of experiences or thoughts, a caress whereby the malevolent and the barbaric, whilst far from being forgotten, nevertheless achieve a kind of distillation whereby finesse, grace, something perhaps of an indulgence, a forgiving compassion may be salvaged, whereby some light, some enlightenment may shine. Obsession with what Nadaud calls the ‘remainders of a wrecked universe’ can thus be seen to entail no congealment, no static psychology or ontology, nor any fixity of plastic manner. What I have 5

See infra for a full discussion of this key collaboration.

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termed recycling is a dynamic process, an art of gathering up of what is and its transformation, even what we may think of as its transfiguration. For the poetics of recycling is in many respects that of metaphorisation (: ie a ‘carrying-over’), symbolization (: a ‘throwing together’), processes whereby – and Nadaud tells us that ‘metaphor constitutes my preferred tool’6 – A (old bells and netting, for example, as in Maison mère (troupeau)) + B (the trees of the Parc de la Courneuve and the wind blowing, etc.) becomes what Stéphane Mallarmé called that ‘third element, fusible and bright’, ie not just a sum of the parts of A and B, but a new object or phenomenon, a ‘place’ of being-in-theworld not truly situatable or even describable. This ‘throwingtogether’ of component elements remodels being, produces a newness that, playfully, reflecting the interplay of A and B and their transfiguration (: their figuration crossing over in both [or all: components may be numerous] directions, senses (sens), can often find its home in Nadaud’ titles: L’Heure du thé, for example, with its two rounded wooden ‘trays’, one half folded upwards and propped by a turned leg, and an old leash meandering from ‘tray’ to ‘tray’, or La Gricole (with its play on words and matter), or, as we have seen, La Fin des Gaules. If A and B contain autoreferencing (wood=wood, tin=tin, goat bells=goat bells, etc.) and if it is abundantly clear that Nadaud’s funkiest or most enigmatic work – L’Eau régale (1991-95), perhaps, to which I shall return – grounds itself in the real and our conceptualization of it, it remains that, as Bernard Noël has noted, what Nadaud’s genius involves is presenting us with ‘fictional things having the solidness of the real’. Recycling: the creation of fiction, of ‘narratives of assembly’, as Frédéric Valabrègue writes, the fabrication of new truths, ‘carried-over’ and ‘thrown-together’ from the scraps of a real so often cast aside, unthought, unsung, that, yet, for some, have deep, moving pertinence with a full gamut of emotions and meaning at play. Can we, at this point of our consideration of the considerable oeuvre of Daniel Nadaud, reach towards a clearer picture of the purpose and the why of his doing, his poiein? I offer, here, ten compact remarks:

6

Cyroulnik argues against this metaphorical dimension, though settling for a poetics that changes and disturbs meanings.


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1: art, for Nadaud, is instinctively constructive, it raises up (: struere) with: with the elements of our consciousness of the world and our being: such ‘con-struction’ is the primary viscerally motivating factor: it heeds the drive to do, to make, to add to what is, and, in this, eludes ‘despair’ which may thus be seen as a surrendering to non-doing and a stagnation of being;7 2: art involves ‘dreaming’ and the ‘seeing’ of Rimbaud’s voyant: in that, though founded upon materiality, the teeming thereness of matter, art purposes and ‘means’ beyond the latter, transmuting it into Reverdy’s antinature with what Nadaud recognizes as its temptations urging the artist’s staying in the haven, the refuge, the non-place or unspace of art – as Nadaud writes, with a smile, we fancy, there is ever the chance that ‘the artist drowns in La Gricole’, the indefinable space/unspace of art’s ‘fabulation’ that, yet, as Nadaud fully understands, entails ‘self-exhibition’, an exposure of the self that nevertheless does not equate with autobiography as we generally conceive it, but is perhaps akin to that generation of ‘autofictional fragments’ of which Alain Robbe-Grillet has spoken and whereby subjectivity creates its others;8 3: art’s purposing may frequently rest upon a sense of ‘stiflement’ and ‘bewilderment’ that yet propels doing and making, dragging these emotions along, though trans-figuring them: such a movement of psychological and affective energy may, moreover, push art into what Nadaud calls ‘error’, even something like disaster – ‘the artist can capsize’, he notes – and, beyond perhaps allusions here to works which Nadaud titles Naufrage and Premier naufrage, we may see here, simultaneously, a metaphor for the artist being viscerally caught up in the collapse, the ruin, the ‘death’ that Nadaud sees in the countryside’s ‘immense cemetery’, and even civilization more broadly, and thus, perhaps, a metaphor for, despite its ‘con-

7 8

For a good deal of what I am arguing here, see Nadaud’s text L’artiste construit…. See Robbe-Grillet’s excellent Romanesques trilogy (Minuit, 1984-1994).

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structive’ doing, art’s failure, its relativity, its incapacity to achieve fabulations of adequate transformational ontic power; 4: passion, ‘burning’ yet drive art: they may not be the purpose proper of artistic activity, but they are the engines of its ‘divine illusions’, terms which, of course, suggest clearly the tensions at the heart of Nadaud’s work and confrontingopposing-unifying high ideality and elevation on the one hand, and, on the other, that doubting of the latter’s validity we have just seen; 5: if Philippe Cyroulnik argues against the notion of a poetics of elevation, beauty and marvellousness in Nadaud’s work, it is no doubt because he sees therein a hauntedness, a sense of the nightmarish that disturbs the equation too much; and it is true, Nadaud will affirm it in L’Artiste construit… and elsewhere – most recently in a postface to the 2007 Délicat désastre – art’s purposing, its orientation, may conceivably involve ‘violen[ce], indeed aggress[ion]’, even ‘unshakeable rage’, emotions that may have ‘political’ implications even if art’s design is not to develop them in systematized and rationally overt fashion, but, rather, opts for obliqueness and a pertinence that, whilst emerging from history, yet ‘has no hour’, no temporal limitedness, being ever in excess of its specificities; 6: the latter specificities, with all that is ethically, sociopolitically and emotionally carried via their urgency, yet never speak the whole story with Daniel Nadaud: we have spoken of the primacy of the logic of con-struction and poietic raising and doing, spoken too of the aesthetics-cum-ethics of grace, charm that, even if ‘illusorily’, is oriented towards something one could think of as a form of transcendence, a dreamed, virtual overcoming of existential problem, of what NineteenthCentury France repeatedly called le Mal, in all or any of its manifestations; and, furthermore, as we have seen, wit, humour, play, edgy and/or charming, constitute a major mode of Nadaud’s artistico-ontological ambitioning, a mode full of nuance and dexterous ambivalence, a mode not by-passing the intensity of livedness, but restoring further some measure of


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that equilibrium Nadaud’s sculptures/objects materially and metaphorically achieve: ‘the artist amuses himself’, we are told in L’Artiste construit…;9 7: is Nadaud’s art iconoclastic, as some critics have suggested?: if what is implied by iconoclasm involves a repudiation of art’s former modes and presumed intentions, one would be inclined to give only a partial encouragement to the argument, recognizing that Nadaud’s art leaps beyond the prestige of painting without expressing scorn for its many genial practitioners; on the other hand, the dominant thinking and ‘imaging’ of modern and contemporary life Nadaud greets in substantially subversive and dissident ways, albeit ever maintaining a personal balance – via wit, play, grace, ‘con-structive’ doing – that disallows tipping over into an art of outright and constant polemical denunciation risking despair, utter bitterness, even madness: a breaking, then, of the images, the imagos, the masks of our presence-to-the-world, but maintaining an at times smiling and determinedly selfuplifting ‘illusion’ of art’s re-imag(in)ing potential; 8: in November 1971, in his notes written in Aubais, Nadaud tells us that artistic work is ‘a place of questioning and searching’, ie never a closed, achieved action or phenomenon, and, even if it involves and may be said to constitute an ‘end in itself, it is above all a beginning’, ie an act and place of incipience, inauguration, opening and initiation, newness and birthing: it is perhaps thus unsurprising that a year later Nadaud’s notes go, in a sense, even further in arguing, in the 1972 Viallat text, that art’s purpose, its very meaning, lies not within what is done, the plastic work produced, offered, exhibited and shared, but in the act of doing itself: it is as if, though the human leaves traces, these traces not only will disappear – he is conscious of this pure mortality in the same text – but can do so with nothing of ontological significance truly changing;

9

The etymology of s’amuser suggests being lost in thought, meditation, a divertedness, serious or trifling.

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9: Nadaud’s Viallat text, along with another titled RIEN doit devenir TOUT,10 reveals much of his sense of the utter complexity of all plastic meaning: whilst we may read the second of these two texts as ironic and even offering persiflage to Nadaud’s/any artist’s pretentious over-investment in work produced, the first text both reaffirms art’s deep purposing as lying in ‘work itself’, the endlessly self-exploratory flow of being through the process of (art’s) doing, and indicates the degree to which ‘comprehension and meaning can only be established and transformed via becoming completely aware of everything producing them and working towards their existence by struggling against a society that misappropriates them and continually sugar-coats them so as to better subjugate them’: purposing, for Nadaud, may thus be seen to fold a certain detachment into a mode of attachment: doing takes it over the done, and yet what is done needs and desires a full consciousness of a doing broadly misunderstood: the ‘nothingness’ and the ‘allness’ Nadaud has in mind can lead to two logics of art, the one smiling, distanced from the value and prestige others may or may not offer art’s gesture and product, the other ‘struggling’ to right the misconceptions and misappropriations arguably impacting the latter; 10: although we could see such a fused poetics of attachmentdetachment – Michel Deguy has written tellingly of this ‘construct’ – as implying some artistic programme, it is important to appreciate the absence of fixity such purposing implies: just as individual works such as Juste ciel (1988) (with its delightfully witty and yet gracefully harmonious welding of wood and steel, shell and paint into the funkiest of small (57 x 42 x 19cm) sculptures/objects, half-Miróesque, half-Pagèslike) or the 1986 Vingt-quatre heures de plein air (a quirky assemblage of improbable parts, porcelain spoon handle, ironing plate, chair back with its two legs, a farm fork, etc.) or,

10

A text I have been unable to contextualise and which the artist kindly sent me in a dossier showing work up until 2002. The title I give it is imposed over the text of a short anecdote recounting the draconian rejection of a young artist’s (Nadaud’s?) drawings done it seems in Algeria.


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again, the 2001 Filature (with its hundreds of yards of knotted rope constituting a vast web from which hang some seventy cattle- and other bells above the gardens of the ENAD in Aubusson) – just as works as varied as these refuse the ever differing interpretive equations we might wish to reduce them to, so, in more global and abstract terms, does Nadaud’s ‘programme’ of plastic creativity retreat into the plis, the folds, of its com-pli-catedness, a freedom that constitutes an act and place of paradoxical simplicity where spiritual and ontological pertinence are acted out in that maelstrom of emotional energy where turbulence and serenity, melancholy and joy maintain a strange synonymity. By way of conclusion I should like to look at two ostensibly very different works by Daniel Nadaud: the 1991-95 L’Eau régale and the drawings of the 2007 book, Délicat désastre en trente-six poses, with its short companion texts by Bernard Noël. Pierre Griquel describes L’Eau régale – which Nadaud himself smilingly terms ‘a 35piece out of service’ – as porcelain objects on ‘a raised table covered in a white cloth [giving it the air] of a pagan altar. A silent piece in which unusable utensils are adorned to beautiful effect, a dreamy and cruel conceit, resisting all interpretation, free’. Nadaud does not offer any commentary himself, the title possibly evoking the role of aqua regia in the preparation of the ceramic effect, an aesthetic ‘triumph’ we may just conceivably see in tense opposition to the acid’s power to dissolve the gold and platinum of reality’s utilitarian but luxury dinner service ware, food and all. L’Eau régale’s deliberate puzzlement is matched by its enchantment: it is as radically irreducible as it is surreally ‘marvellous’ via its deployed fascinations. Its exquisite delicacy of fabrication gives grace and sereneness to its defiance. Can we see the work as offering a sly, witty, mischievous wink to (paintings of) the Last Supper? Certainly it would be our last, were we to consume it – other than as pure art. L’Eau régale’s ‘spirituality’ is substantially other, poetic, just as its availableness is foreign to all and any consumerism. May we deem its stark but elegant whiteness to be symbolic of its removal from all besmirching critical discourse, all signings and markings duly conjured away? Is its unconsumableness, its implicit aqua regia acidity, a gesture of some aggressiveness or perhaps corrosive ridicule or reminder of human frailties? Is art simultaneously a

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victory of sorts over life’s corrosions and dissolutions, an illusory haven from their effects, and an exposure, an ironic reminder of them? L’Eau régale, of course, provides no answers, perhaps does not even pose questions, preferring its poetical antinaturalness in a gesture of aloofness or jubilance accomplishing a self-liberation that, yet, without contradiction, affirms an independence from the myriad quizzings to which its strange inedible creations give rise. Délicat désastre en trente-six poses finds it hard, indeed impossible, to maintain this aesthetic distance and frustration of all hermeneutic inquiry. Its title speaks directly, even no doubt ironically, of the tension between aesthetic subtlety and grace, and the existential ‘disaster’ the drawings simultaneously evoke. Bernard Noël’s brief prose poems further articulate this tension, this paradoxical fusing of heavily contrasted human doing. And, were we by some miracle in any doubt, Daniel Nadaud’s Postface speaks of his – and, implicitly, (his) art’s – ‘impotence and tender unshakeable rage’ that can roar silently through being and gesture. We are never, in effect, far from the fraught poetics and ontologies of great poets and artists such as Baudelaire and Lautréamont, Delacroix and Rimbaud. We wonder how beauty and wit and charm and the greatest delicacy coexist, are fused even, in the bizarre unifiedness of human beingness and doing. Bernard Noël speaks of the ‘incongruous couplings’ Nadaud’s drawings generate – the interwoven helmet-bell-axe-plane-sock in 3;11 the skulls-pincers-pots and pans in 11; the crown of thorns-rocketsmissiles-vegetation and unidentifiable forms in 27; the barrowful of broken bits of weaponry in 47; and so on – couplings ever reminding us of the logics of metaphor and symbol, their casting together of disparates in that incomprehensible place of art’s oneness and, as Bonnefoy would say, presence’s ‘One’, at once ineffable and unspeakable. Birds, humans, seem equally shootable in a chaos of forms (ladder, sock, train or truck) in 19. It is a chaos everywhere rife with ruin, derisory ‘remainders’ (cf. 39), yet a chaos and ruin and ongoing destruction ‘sung’ into art’s saddened poetry. Noël’s proses are searingly ironic, as sharp, as piercing as the forms proliferating in Nadaud’s poetic images, those mariages contre nature as he calls them, alert to their capacity to speak simultaneously – as do Noël’s own texts – of 11

I give the pagination here and below.


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their imaginative power and of the terrible and unnatural marriages the world produces all so often. Questions indeed may be deemed as vain as answers in the times in which we live, Noël scathingly and sadly, yet with the tireless energy of wit that is Nadaud’s too, tells us in 48. Nadaud’s drawn heads of revolutionary thinkers (67) end up being cooked alive – their bodies dissolved in aqua regia? Or, at least, succumbing to totalitarianism’s ‘killing of thought’ in an economy of often glitteringly empty image and weapon manufacture (cf, Noël, 40). Daniel Nadaud may talk of impotence, and Bernard Noël of ‘violence everywhere in the three dimensions, death not opening up in the fourth’ (30), this in the context of Nadaud’s enigmatic, ever uncontextualised but ominous triptych (31) depicting a half-familiar man12 in a storm of cut-up tubing (?) before a darth-vader-like bellmask and its surrounding instruments of attack. They may talk thusly; and here, in Délicat désastre en trente-six poses, they do. But their very talking-drawing, the sheer power of their poiein, their poietic resistance, determination and continuing – this is the very epitome of a potency and a potentiality that make their work, their two remarkable oeuvres, and, in consequence, their lives, their ‘delicate’ presence to the world, gifts for which many remain grateful.

12

Leon Trotsky?

CONCLUSION These deliberately brief closing words will not seek to impose some crowning synthetic rationalising structure upon the twenty-two artists whose work I have had the pleasure to wrestle with over the last four years. Difference has reigned, despite, inevitably, the deferral, the différance, of interrelevancies and interweavings that all plastic gesture entails. My emphasis throughout has centred on an appreciation of the distinct creative and transformative power of unique – one glance will separate a Calle or a Pincemin from a Garouste or a Deblé –, highly individualized oeuvres. The gratitude to the artists I expressed in the short Preface to this book goes beyond questions of assistance and exchange of ideas: it is a gratitude to the specific work produced and the ceaseless process of production on which the latter depends. But such work cannot be embraced via some reductive, tightly compacting theorization smoothing out wrinkles that make up the complex complexion of each specific oeuvre, plunged as it is in the freest, the least congealed of sensory, sensual response, gestural doing and contemplative consciousness. Certainly, play, wit, irony are often rife, but so too is an intense ‘seriousness’ emanating from the swarming experience of daily life, of the latter’s foundational pertinence, of the ever shifting awareness of the self’s relation to Bonnefoy’s ‘things of the simple’ via the plastic gesture elected. To see art as always a mode of abstraction, of evacuation of one’s direct presence to the world in favour of a plastic product definitively removed from the fluidity of one’s being, is a simplification of the equation ever renewed between artist and his or her work, his or her gesture, doing, poiein, and not just the produced painting, sculpture, photograph, etc. All gestures of all of the artists examined here deploy that unspeakable human energeia at the centre of all doing, at the centre too of the thinking through of this doing: there is no ‘pulling away’, no detachedness, no indifference: art for a Pagès or a Perronne is the very energisation of a barely sayable presence to the world, beyond emotions of belonging or exiledness. Such art is not some aesthetic tittification of existence. It is visceral, psychical, spiritual in the largest sense of the term. It is one’s very breath, one’s enthousiasmos, one’s blindingly incomprehensible souffle, an act of giving oneself

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(back) to being, to one’s fragile yet stunningly and powerfully ever potential beingness. The gestures of a Ben Vautier or a Geneviève Asse – and over and above the vast specificities that my analyses have dealt with – yet rest on an art of self-enactment, self-realisation. They found a place/non-place of that bizarre ‘consubstantiality’ of self and world, bios and ontos, Pierre Reverdy deemed to be at the heart of all creative activity. And it is a place/non-place ever reinvested, refounded, via a gesture ever renewed, never finding satisfaction in the produced, but rather in the act of producing, the ever desiring and ongoing process of doing. Art’s meanings are, in consequence, never contained, said and defined. They are fluid, ever becoming, debatable, rethinkable, contestable, ever questioned and so ever recommenced. Art is not finality, ‘death’, but a psychical and gestural mouvance, an act and an unplaceable place of continuous unfolding of mean-ing, sens, orientation, not congealed significations and absolute signifiés – like the light of the sun across a meadow chanced upon or illuminating an old stone wall or revealing the enigmatical thereness of a face known, ever unknown. Art, that of a Louise Bourgeois or a Joël Kermarrec, that of an Anne Messager or a Gérard Titus-Carmel, is, at root, agnosis, instinctive refusal of closure, but this a-gnosis, this turning aside from the quick equations of knowing, is no weakness, no surrender to impotence. Its energeia contradicts such a notion at every turn. On the contrary, its agnosis is the sign, the very process and procession, the theoria, of art’s adventure, its ceaseless advent, surging, its ever reinventing of self and all that is. It is genesis, ever here, ever now, ever (self-)searching, (self-) querying. It is the tireless launching and relaunching of being and the doing being renders possible. It never stays stuck either in its forme or its fond. In this it lives on the edge of its own ontological and gestural strangeness. If this may seem more visible with artists like Bourgeois or Pincemin, Kermarrec or Garouste, at root it is just as true for a Morellet toying with mathematics and arguable randomness, a Viallat who opts out of ‘subject-matter’ and into an implacable self-signing doingness of being’s/art’s form, a Perronne caught between matter’s silence and the mind’s endless fabulations, a Favier facing death with the fragile tools of a ballpoint and a wry grin. But, as we see here, the modes of any ‘sameness’ all of this may appear to imply are delightfully and infinitely different. The specific manner of art’s ‘praxis’ best speaks its ‘theory’, which, in its infinite articulatableness, remains equally a pure silence. For,

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beyond any conceivable ‘agendas’, emotional, ethical, socio-political, spiritual, aesthetic, the return to any given work of any given artist takes us ever, and far, beyond all isms, very often even beyond all description. Rather do we find ourselves faced with the disappearance of art into its secrecy, its ‘absence’, an is-ness that is its own and that cannot be supplied and imposed hermeneutically from outside itself. Art, retreating into its own beingness, yet ever emerging from what it is not, yet upon which it gazes, with you, with myself, via a doingand-being-in-the-world whose logic it ever tussles with in the dance of allness.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (all places of publication Paris, unless indicated)

Agamben, Giorgio. La Puissance de la pensée. Payot, 2006. Alliou, Kathy. ‘Récit d’une découverte’, in Daniel Nadaud, 2003. Amic, Sylvain. ‘Le chasseur, le cueilleur, l’ogre’, in Daniel Dezeuze, 2009. Angremy, Jean-Pierre. ‘Préface’, in Geneviève Asse, 2002. Arrouye, Jean. ‘Voyage ironique aux îles’, in Une oeuvre de Philippe Favier, 1995. Asse. Dossier pédagogique. Rennes: MBA, 2003. Asse, Geneviève. See Rainer Michael Mason. --. ‘La pointe de l’oeil’, in Geneviève Asse, 2002. --. See Alberte Grynpas Nguyen. --. See Geneviève Asse, 2008. Beauffet, Jacques. Entretien avec Daniel Dezeuze, in Daniel Dezeuze, 1980. Berthet, Dominique. ‘La création par la destruction. Entretien avec Christian Jaccard’, in Recherches en Esthétique, sept. 1998. Bertrand, Anne. ‘Des heures’, in Philippe Favier, 2001. Besson, Christian. ‘Ventilation’, in Daniel Dezeuze, 2004. Bishop, Michael. ‘Imbrications et originalités: quelques remarques sur l’art de Danièle Perronne’, in Danièle Perronne Oeuvres, 2010. --. Contemporary French Art 1. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008. --. Altérités d’André du Bouchet. De Hugo, Shakespeare et Poussin à Celan, Mandelstam et Giacometti. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2003. --. Entretien avec Christian Jaccard, in Dalhousie French Studies (76, 2006). Bishop, Michael, and Christopher Elson, eds. L’Art français et francophone depuis 1980. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2005. Blanchot, Maurice. Le Très-haut. Gallimard, 1988. Blistène, Bernard. ‘Carnets, 1980-1984’, in Gérard Garouste, 1984. Bonnaval, Jacques. ‘Tribun salonnard...’, in Philippe Favier. Pentimento, 1994.

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Bonnefoy, Yves. La Présence et l’image. Mercure de France, 1983. --. Remarques sur le dessin. Mercure de France, 1993. --. The Radiant Space. Halifax: Éditions VVV, 2009. Trans. Michael Bishop. --. Lieux et destins de l’image. Seuil, 1999. Boudier, Laurent. ‘Pili’, in P.I.L.I: une oeuvre de Philippe Favier, parcours de Jacques Roubaud, 2001. Bougelet, Patrick et al. ‘Philippe Favier: Approchez-vous’, in Sans titre, avril 1996. Brosse, Laurence. ‘Une interview de Gérard Garouste’, Le Monde des Arts, 2001. Busine, Laurent. ‘À propos de Quichotte’, in Quixote apocrifo, 1999. Cabanne, Pierre. Gérard Garouste. EC Éditions, 2000. --. Gérard Garouste. Éditions de la Différence, 1990. Calle, Robert. See Alfred Pacquement. Calmettes, Joël. Entretien avec Gérard Garouste, in ‘Le Classique et l’Indien’, Théâtre du Rond-Point, 2008. Catonné, Jean-Philippe. Entretien avec Danièle Perronne, in Danièle Perronne Oeuvres, 2010. Ceysson, Bernard. ‘Le sublime, la terreur, l’ordre’, in Christian Jaccard. Papiers calcinés 1974-1984. Corbeil-Essonnes: Centre d’Art Contemporain Pablo Neruda, 1985. --. ‘Préface’, in Questions/Peinture, 2005. --. ‘Une oeuvre est une rose est une rose’, in Daniel Dezeuze, 1980. Chabot, Jacques. ‘Ils étaient trois’, in Une oeuvre de Philippe Favier, 1995. Chalumeau, Jean-Luc. Colette Deblé. Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2002. Chassey, Éric de. ‘On a souvent considéré...’, in Dezeuze à Sully, 2002. --. ‘Alléger la peinture’, in Daniel Dezeuze, 2009. Chevillard, Éric. ‘Commentaire autorisé sur l’état de squelette’, in Philippe Favier, 2004. Christian Jaccard. Anonymes calcinés des 19e et 20e siècles. Musées de Nice, 1983. Christian Jaccard, œuvres récentes 1982-1989. Centre d’Art contemporain de Saint-Priest, 1989. Christian Jaccard. Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte Croix des Sables d’Olonne, 1975.

Selected Bibliography

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