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The painter, thrown like a pebble
into the pool of the world, forms circles around his falling-point:
eddies, ripples. The colours form marks inside and outside
the picture’s field. The palette expands, overflowing
onto table, ground, walls and everything around, in the
dilation space of the pictorial fattura. Once in the trance
of the creative gesture, the painter becomes, as it were,
shaman, wizard - transforming, transmuting, a material
to consider and feel, in the crucible of the studio, through
a sort of sacred dance just like a liturgical act.
In his becoming-painting, acting with his whole body on
and around the canvas, the painter serves as a pivot to
the beat of the work, which engrosses him day to day,
like Uranus who lies endlessly on Gaïa, from whom
he cannot separate, and whose call he cannot resist. In
the desire to be, and the desire for work that constantly
intersects, the painter’s acting leaves art’s
circle of artifice to better penetrate the encircling
of life. Circonvolutions, vibrations signal themselves,
and he who signals his name finds therein his loss and
his salvation.
When through his gestures he hammers and forges his own
nails, when he punctures, pierces, dissects and divides,
when he splits or merges material, painter becomes blacksmith.
And as a result of the ever-rising and fueling inner flame,
he models his objects, folds and unfolds them on the anvil
of his desire. If, passing from raw to refined gesture,
carving, to the smallness of the treasure he buries in
niches, cases, alveoli, he thereby reduces the size of
the settings and imparts with the gold of his paintings
a goldsmith’s destiny.
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Noir
et Blanc
1985-1986
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 76 cm |
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Hommage
à A.Tàpies
1975
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
25,5 x 20 x 2,5 cm |
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Parade
1963
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
122 x 183 cm |
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And when the painter
opens the surface passage up to volume, from line to relief,
rectangle to enclosure, landscape to geology, the work
breathes and occupies space. He rearranges passages, travelling
from found to manipulated materials, cobbled forms, replete
thrusting forces, even to raw material. Boundaries are
then set up - a cartography wherein appears the contour
of continents (Noir et Blanc, 1985-1986), and now
the painter trims the cloth of the world by crossing a
diagonal, thereby separating darkness from light. Arranging
concave and convex, valleys and mounds, provoking rises,
swelling, puffing, blistering skin, thickening bark, strata
that pile up in superimposition, the wind then fills the
sails, the hull starts sliding towards the sea, and painter
becomes sculptor/geographer.
This is what the picture bespeaks when it offers up its
mute façades, reliefs, slits, openings and closings,
its airy spaces and enclosed chambers, constructions,
structures - beam, mantel, lintel – its slings, sticks,
ropes, monochrome wall-sections (Composition architecturale,
1980) or deep alleys where the light is consumed. Repeating
such gestures so as to trace, encircle, divide, distribute,
delineate, compartmentalize, fractionize, enclose, the
painter then acts as architect/surveyor (Hommage à A. Tàpies, 1975). When, like a violin-maker
he works his smooth, curved or rectilinear tables, swelling
or concave surfaces, arranging openings, orifices, sections,
replete with threads, ropes, pieces of wood, commonly
if not lovingly attached, glued, set in, arranging harmonies,
repetitions, rhythms, metres, the painter composes a cantata
and acts as musician.
When, imbuing an alcove, cavity or box with the intimate
space of secrets, the painter names his works as his children,
he gives birth to himself. When he finally unveils the
incisions of his gashes, his fracture, his eviscerations,
his chasms, and especially when, in his dead silence,
he lays death on the surface of the canvas to let it better
transmit threat, torment, the pain of tearing, and thereby
record human jolts and movements through slow or precipitous,
calm or quick gestures in black or white, the painter
acts as seismographer.
When the target-painting, riddled with holes, perforations,
evokes the feeling of a riddled life, tracing its writing
through wounds and marks, then painting becomes palimpsest
and support for cicatricial memory (Composition no
4, 1975). Then, the painter acts as archer, and peers
with one eye at his target, with the other at the hazards
of the world, and aims, in his center, at both. And when
figures have disappeared, material and cloth cling like
a garment to the body of the work - a second skin where
folds, necklines, hems capture light, better to reveal
its weave, texture, grain, and then convey the body, absent
from the representation but present in the work’s
physical and material reality (Parade, 1963). A
subterranean presence that lets itself be apprehended
in the rhythms and movements of the surface, depths lying
beneath the painting’s superimposed layers, like
so many masks and veils placed over the bodily presence
of something unspoken.
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Composition Architectural
1980
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 51 x 7,5 cm
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Composition no 4
1975
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
25,5 x 20 x 2,5 cm
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