BLA, BLA, BLA...
1 – Introduction
2 – Execution
3 – Developement
4 – Conclusion
5 – Acknowledgments
1 – Introduction
Before the prose, the speech or any concept : a white sheet. The point, the stroke, shaded into the colour to the space. Thousands of parameters difficult to manage, in the most instable balance. By sensibility rather than by choice an “operating mode” is established. Cultural, emotional and tactile sensitivity, the source is obscure. The clearer, stable and simple is the operating mode greater is the freedom of expression and improvisation.
The colour, the material complement or oppose the stroke, the composition. The gesture is ambidextrous, meticulous or unbridled , ambiguous and double . To establish a balance a choice has to be made.
Every choice involves reflection, speech, prose etc… life in random meetings, here also through affinity, proposes texts of writers, historians or even scientists. Through fate or necessity those texts could have been different, the discourse changed. Pre-texts that feeds the “operating mode” and manage the sensibility. A “come and go” whrere thougt and sensibility fight in a mutual stimulation.
The hand feel and think, the tongue taste and talk ; tactile thought and pleasure for talk - - a binary discourse, twice.
2 – Execution
From the beginning, very fast, at the edge of the paper, smoothed, shrivelled and white : The black ink weapon is called Rotring o,5mm!
An hallucinating flight where monsters like intergalactic aliens get lost in constructions of improbables perspectives, mad like Jimmy Hendrix’s guitars and psychotropic’s vapors. Fumes disperse, breaks up, guitars calm down when Coltrane plays and Miles Davis climb on the stage; monsters become stains, curves or roundness; horizons are all lost at last, constructions become straights connections that criss- crosses themselves and finish the composition.
A code is established , a structure is shaped, a language takes form. By chance of sensitivity, the chosen forms could have been others; the structures judged as significant, different …..It’s analysis has no scientific pretention; poetic may be…
The structures
1 – Comes from the network formed by the differents kingdoms in nature (vegetal, animal and mineral).
2 – Comes from the network born from my human urban brain (mental structures like a repertoire of automatics writings).
For example : Carpaccio’s icon,” St Georges and the dragon”(see Michel Serres text) :
1 – Nature network : Left: the cavern, the dragon, the maiden. Up : round or spiral shaped clouds.
2 – Human network : Right : the city, the heroe, the horse (or carriage). Down : the labyrinth, the catacombs.
Surrealism soars and will only stop when :
Up and down, left and right exist no more (A.Breton).
These structures are found, seen, memorized and copied, modified, transformed but never invented.
Invention is imagining pre-existing objects (shapes) consciously or not, transposed, transformed according to the taste, the chance or the necessity. “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed”. (Lavoisier)
ABSTRACTION IS FIGURATIVE
Figuration is ab-stract, extract. Drawn out of context, without any pretext, structures change their place and reason being to give up their opposition and stop killing themselves…The structures are interchangeable within the same mythical frame that surrounds them : The nature itself where man IS the nature. Surrealism may now rest; double opposition, duality of speech ends the opposition. Adam and Eve are lying down naked, entwined, in broad daylight, free.
3 – Development
After the stiff and smooth paper, the discovery of the hand- crafted paper in Saint Prex work group but also in the mill of Mr Duchêne in Couze (France).
The free fibers are thrown and spread, they are imprisoned in the sheet and in the octagonal wire net. Binary code in the material itself, as a support for the performance. The material is soaked in colour or rubbed with pigments, drawn or painted… The structures born in the mind or in the observations of nature are gathered in the material used.
Water colour brings the gesture , the stain, the colour, the emotion. So much pleasure in the colour with the tempera (gouache).
Acrylic includes the largest formats, real size human form is projected : man is nature.
With oils, paste becomes material for problems as to reflection/solutions.
The stretcher tenses the canvas nailed and finished to make the base… how much time I have needed to find the background : the binary code in keeping with nature made of lines, straight or curved of fibre and cattice.
For centuries oil painting has been a mental matter, coats in vitrified varnishes, are…….in a preconceived unrelenting logic; Due to need faith or ideology. A need to represent in perspective : the religious Holy Trinity, or the trinity social classes. There is no possible improvisation from the “operating mode”. The limited effects of chance are rapidly repressed to become the method : The dogma. (From trinity to binary).
Still, I am often fascinated by my capacity to create drawings and paintings that apparently “mean to say nothing” surprised in the unsaid, they float…..
Sense is not in the representation, but in the subtle balance formed by sensitivity and by chance; as from the will to execute, to make, to re-make, to re-structure to reorganize. Improvisation in a rare, indefinable “state of grace”; a free sensitive re-structuration.
4 – Conclusion
To the sticked lines of a Büren or a Morrelet, the packings of Cristo, the boogie- woogies of Mondrian, the geometries of Delaunay, of Vasarely and others cubists, mad conceptualists of computer creations; would be opposed by the paintings of de Kooning, Fautrier, Rothko, Zao-Wu-Ki; impressionism, expressionism; arte povera or action painting with a paint brush or a whip!
So, for a dialogue, a binary code is required, in double morphologies, mixed and free to end the killing. To end with the speech (bla, bla, bla )between thousands of other sado-masochistics culpable couples; master/slave, rich/poor, good/evil, human/animal, man/women.
Is proposed (as conclusion) the pairing master/student, friend/collegue, Freud/Jung in the explicite film “A dangerous method”
5 – Acknowledgments .
To the St Prex workgroup where I learned the love of work well done with best quality materials and magnificent papers. This was also my first true contact with non figurative painters, like Pierre Tal-Coat, Yersin, Edmond Quinche, Michel Duplain and not least Pietro Sarto, Hans Erni, Gérard de Palézieux, Lecoultre and not to forgot the cooking of Luce!
To Liliane Schneiter, professor of history in the school of Fine Art in Geneva for having given direction to my “mémoire” (school end work) and makes me discover the little book written by Michel Serres : The esthetic of Carpaccio’s “St Georges and the dragon” and texts by Sartre on Tintoret and Wols.
To all my friends who have made me understand the intelligence of the hand, that marvelous comprehensive tool that feels and thinks at the same time.
To Etta Gonet, friend and webmaster, without her help this web page would never have existed. To Olivier Gonet for his paintings, his books, his white wine and his peculiar sense of humour.
To Maria-Jose Bartual for the correction of my translation from French to Spanish. To Elena Rosenthal and Christopher Burrel to help me for the English translation.