If I say lime meaning a lemon which is green, though I can do my best,
its green quality will be added to that of being a lemon so that it
comes second in the course of language. Whereas in a painting, and there
lies its advantage over the linearity of writing, my subject can be
merged into the colour. Quality and essence amount to the same and this
is how I see things in reality or rather how they come up to me. Thus
I won't talk about a misunderstanding but rather about a sheer bewilderment
which strikes both painter and writer when the latter displays his energy
to speak about the work of the former. Just as it may appear obvious
in a glimpse that the painting gathers together its dynamico structure,
the commentary breaks it up. This text won't go
about it differently.
In the schematization of shape lies the painter's process which enables
him to reach its matter.
It can't be otherwise. This axiom must indisputably stand as a starting
point: in a most direct way, the colour will schematically in a brush
stroke produce this apple during the following phases. And later this
colour will be taken into care by the other shades. The mere formally
defined sketch will rough out the definition of a base for the next
layers. The direction of the stroke
will determine the shape that the painter shall blend out. This process,
however, is a continuous flow linked to a way of perceiving and being
affected. In my case, as I am not an artist, this is how painters figure
it out: the act is immediate, spontaneous while very elaborated.
What is perceived affects instantaneously the movement which becomes
concrete through the schematization of shape. If I insist on a mode
of cognition which appears particular to the painter it is because it
can't be the same for our visual and mental habits. Schematization doesn't
usually
trigger our thoughts because we proceed through deduction and induction.We
shift from the whole to a part and from the part to the whole. Then
we go through the intermediate phases in order to recall and string
together our manifold impressions. Our comprehension of things is
sequenced whereas the painter grasps them at once deep down to their
essence and original drive. The variation will be given in one stroke.
And this stroke corresponds to a straightforward and intuitive knowledge
of shape which can wrap it up in one glimpse. It is through intuition
again that all the parts of a shape will be put together because the
painter thinks through correlation. While schematizing he identifies
beforehand the variations through solidarity and complementarity of
structures. When, we, often proceed through analogy or comparison. It
is
not the same way at all of perceiving or being affected. Correlation
involves a link between two phenomenons which vary according to one
another. The fore and the background, light and shade, primary and complementary
terms, correlated terms punctuate the history of painting
and compose the painter's most intimate vocabulary. While relying on
analogy, we establish resemblances in imagination. The painter doesn't
look for a resemblance between things but for their genesis, their dynamism.
It is the weight, the impact they bear in the visual field
they belong to, and above all in return, how this field has an influence
on them. Which is to say that, through schematization of shape, they
are seized in this visual field. And, as we proceed through comparison
and use metaphors, we could say that in painting it is the shingle which
draws the shape of the wave which has swept it along whereas our mind,
even when imaginative, will always claim that the wave endowed it with
its shape by flowing over and over it: Louise de Solages doesn't evade
the painter's loneliness: from the schematization of shape onwards it
is
just as for the shingle, the different represented objects will shape
the painting.
But, as for us, we shall proceed the other way round. We will start
from the painting as a whole to pick up the details and compare the
different represented objects which compose it: these are
two opposed flows. The loneliness of the painter is irreversible. And
the reversibility of our sight streams up to the mystery of painting.
Bergsonian thought could never be so well applied to the painting and,
hardly plagiarizing him, we could say that through intuition and instinct
the painter finds without seeking it what intelligence is seeking without
finding it. But intelligence flows within intuition and recounts from
one painting to the other the chances and failures, the daring and fears,
the joys and weariness which perceptions and affections struggle through.
Through this correlative lexicon particular to painting which wants
the shape in all its manifold aspects to
correspond to the whole experience of vision, Louise de Solages paints
as many sharp variations as faint changes on recurrent motifs. Each
time the painting itself resounds and strengthens. Either because once
the first colour is layed, the following chromatic phases will intensify
its coloured power: accumulation of energies, stressing directions,
quarrels between lighter and blended zones. Either because a coloured
theme, in small variations, goes up to the premisses of the canvas,
linking imperceptibly shades and modulations playing just as many acoustic
masks
which filter the vibrations and make the canvas paradoxically more percussive.
Either that a change of shape requires the reshaping of the whole system
because a principle of metamorphosis imposes itself in the painter's
field of vision: of course, we ignore the different lines of evolution
which have savaged the canvas. We haven't witnessed all these simultaneous
changes which have run through it or these accidental alterations which
harshly decide of the fate of a painting. But still, we suppose that
because of the correlative nature particular to the
state of mind of the painter and of the pressure upon his consciousness
due to the process of schematization of shape, we suppose that these
disruptions did happen. We are even convinced that it is a risk, a perspective
of upheavals, reverses, unexpected events which are inherent
to the oil painting technic: a risk of sinking into time. The ever destabilized
state of the pattern threatened by a perpetual metamorphosis. Defectibility
of the subject resisting the layers of
colours: never has the painter been in such a heteronomous situation.
He depends on the medium. The slightest variation can foreshadow the
harshest diagnosis. It entails the painter's health and nervous balance.
Colour shakes the nerves and not only the optic one. Optic might have
stood for the schematization of shape. But now that we have moved forward
in the painting, nervous flow covers us even more at each brush stroke.
It is no more a question of optic but of vision. A vision which could
collapse as the painter gets nearer to the core of the problem: the
painting has to stand up. And the hypothesis of a blunt variation, with
oil painting, which would destroy the moment when we reach a clear idea
of the canvas is never excluded. The painter must make sure of all his
mental resources to further the continuity of the directions of all
the possible variations in painting, correlated between them by his
own vision. We could object that what we usually mean by still life
has never raised this type of untimely considerations. We would then
forget Pline the Ancient's conception of a still life developed in his
natural
history book 35 and which dates back to the first century. He recounts
that «a certain Piraïkos, towards the end of the IVth century
b. c., was specialized in the representation of shops, barber's and
cobbler's shops, donkeys, kitchen supplies and other similar things.»
The derogatory hint which was linked to such representations which were
baptized «Rhopographies», belonged to those «representations
of meaningless or disguting objects.»(1) Still life first started
by offending and upsetting our aesthetical sense. Much later, we saw
how
Chardin with the skate circumscribed the domain of the meaningless and
disgusting. The violence of this still life has left its mark up to
now in the evolution of art in a recurrent way. As far as we are concerned,
Louise de Solages doesn't do anything apart from struggling against
this tradition and modernity, by dealing with still life through its
most genuine morphology: structure the meaningless or experimental base
of oil painting, while taking into account the lexicon essentially
correlated and particular to the act of painting and the process of
involving oneself in the material through the schematization of shape.
It is a question of assaulting the meaningless and also whatever comes
up as devoided of meaning. It is to this void that the still life is
structurally confronted. This void will indeed help dynamise the different
element of a still life just as, let's say, a synapse would do. A conductive
void of shapes which the entire chinese painting, let's
just recall it, has set as the sheer principle of its profound philosophical
meditation: as for the nature of the still life, it streams through
the lines of good taste and aesthetics. Some time ago, I
had the opportunity to study certain still lives by Donald Sultan, in
particular those where big lemons were represented on coats of tar.
Big violent formats, because of the acid rigidity of the contrasts,
the economy of the means used which saturated one's eyesight, the very
meticulous plainess of shapes. The meaningless conveyed the visible,
one couldn't get away from the motif on the tar background, as its outline
was literally squeezed, if I daresay, that this is what happened next:
all of a sudden, we were faced with light, speed, masses and weights,
articulated by the still lives. These notions were set forward in a
single blow. Thus Sultan was obeying principles established by the constructivists,
knocking over the aesthetics of their time. In Louise de Solages case,
one can also guess the variations of masses, the structures of correlation,
the modification of rhythm which obey drives which have probably streamed
through Klee's and Matisses canvasses: each painter draws from his correlative
affinities just as each poet, if I confine myself to the mere play on
sonorities of language, takes up again the assonances of those, who
preceeded him in a certain direction, to build up verbal material. What
matters lies in the fact that influences should carry painting, further
away considering its totality,
its challenge. How can one identify in painting all the variations that
oil painting accelerates or suddendly slows down, stopping it at a standstill,
how can one eliminate from the field of vision the drives which parasitize
or sclerose the material movement of shapes, how can one follow the
utmost delicate and complex structure of the correlations which appear
on the painting? Obviously, there are no recipes, no directions for
use and theories are always there to be transgressed. But these are
distances which create a gap separating theories from more
recent practices. Of course, in one of Louise de Solages still life,
one can spot the tribute to Kandinsky, Klee, Juan Gris, Exter, Rozanova.
But above all we notice what moves her away from them. I was saying,
a minute ago, that a painter doesn't look for similarities because he
works through correlations rather than through analogies. It is only
through analogies that Louise de Solages still lives remind me of those
of her famous predecessors. It is obviously pleasure and attraction
tothe already seen which have guided me and which are now considered.
And Louise de Solages painting which is essentially assonant insofar
as shapes and motifs, from one painting to another, are repeated, strengthens
an idea of the already seen concerning visual experience:
impulse runs from one canvas to the other through transmission cores.
Fishes, fruits are schematically selected in the canvasses because the
first ones hold back of a nearly cristallysed fluidity what the second
maintains of a decaying solidity. As for the fish, the fluid element
draws the horizontality of the painting. As for the fruits the verticality
is drawn as stemming from the tree. Just as we will repeat verticality
and horizontality, we will reproduce their corresponding
motifs which echo the painting, or rather its structure: vertical as
the fruit and its ascending colour. Colour verticalizes. Horizontal,
as the scale, the skin. The plane aspect of the pattern horizontalizes
...Assonances of the verticals and horizontals which structure the painting.
Assonances as well of the fish and fruit motifs. And this, at least
in my reading, as there are thousands of other possibilities, obey a
freudian economy: «rime, alliteration, refrain and other ways
of distributing sounds in poetry, exploit a similar source of pleasure
which consists in going back to the known.» The visual rime, from
motif to motif, in Solages, the refrain of the distribution of colours
and shapes exploit the same source of pleasure consisting in going back
to
and increasing the known. Undoubtedly. But I can't make sense of any
old and familiar sensation or theories in order to understand the charge
concentrated with violence I experience when seeing how this painter
deals with her motifs. By detaching one from the other or by shutting
them up in configurations which could be defined somehow as protoplasmic,
something cellular, organic exerts a pressure on one's eyesight. And
this gaze which is under pressure remains nevertheless entirely contained
in a system of signs and correspondances which endows
each painting with a homogenous formation, a protected world, enclosing
within itself its own tensions: Wherever I have a feeling of overwhelming
I immediately have that of mastery. Where rage lies,content lies, where
patience lies, the container lies. The painting is standing up. But
it leaves me with the taste that a tensed stare under pressure could
be challenged by the dynamic void we were talking about beforehand.
This void is the one oil painting has fought against from
the schematization of shape onwards. This void is the one from which
correlation has stemmed out lining through the motifs. Finally the motifs
are the ones which, just as the shingle which at last outlines the waves
which have carried it away, have revisited the entire painting.
As for the dynamic movement which in Louise de Solages still lives
has held out an Ariadne thread to us, we must now move to the static
movement, which step by step stops us facing the works.
Each of them, most of the time, are set forward in an atmospheric perspective.
This is a first point. The strenght, the tensions, the weights are shared
out simultaneously on the canvas : all the parts of the painting are
bound and complement one another in order to form a coloured entity
and a graphic construction. What we mean by atmospheric perspective
is what we
feel in front of the merging of air, water and colour. Simultaneously,
on a plane, the elements contaminate one another. Not only the motifs
but the geography where the motifs are embedded. We go from one element
to another and this shift, extremely fluid, leaves the shapes to cool
down behind it and to set in the process of cristallysation which characterizes
the long mastery of oil painting: here, fishes are agonizing, thickening
out and staring at the void, in the still life.
Death is left to dry. Or is it life.
As Louise de Solages, just as in still life number 20, paints organic
small islands which fight against lifeless matter. The organic pattern
needs to be supported by a cristalline formula; eye rings of time, embankments
of painted duration: the plate on the background of the canvas reminds
us of a mosaïc in its circular time where nothings suffers from
erosion. The fishes on the
plate slowly sinking down in a Chagall setting; their scales blurred
in the plane dimension of the canvas. Shifting from the fluid to the
solid. >From dynamism to statics. Mere colours if not unruffled at
least criss crossed and enhanced with slight strokes which fasten the
gaze sweeping
on the chessboard of the organic and stylized pieces. Then everything
settles down. The eye of death concentrically repeats the circular pale
blue which reflects, when I look at the canvas on my left, the very
same except smaller motif. It is a blue circle where the same agony
symetrically flouts me with its far too bright scales. It is also the
asymetry which embroiders its asymptotic theme on the pattern: Khanweiler
wrote: «the representation of the layout of things in space
is done as follows instead of starting from a first plane, from which
thanks to the means of perspective, we produce the illusion of a fictive
depth, the painter starts from a background which he has established
and figured out by himself.» This is what we call schematization
of shape. In still life n° 3, Louise de Solages starts from a background
established according to a visual rhythm which Kandinsky himself wouldn't
repudiate. When I look at the canvas, two fishes pull to the vertical,
with a slightly bluish stiffnes, the whole part of the painting which
is drawn above a geometrical work. At the center and on my right, two
masses, one heliocentric, the other lying at the bottom, on a dark rectangle,
inscribe themselves in an invisible rectangle
triangle topped by a pair of fishes bearing the stare of an owl, yellow
and vacant. And Khanweiler adds: «starting from there, the painter
bids forward a kind of formal scheme where the position of each object
is clearly exhibited in relation to the established background and in
relation to the other objects.» So, in still life n°6, Louise
de Solages gives birth to a spirale and downward movement, the balance
linking, at the top of the canvas, the starry motif with a fruit at
the center sticking out its yellow breast which slightly curtailed,
reproduces the original pattern. All of a sudden, two yellow masses
are inserted between the bluish masses where my eye was resting for
a moment, on a uniform and velvety background. Far on my right, there
is a vertical
edge which runs from light to dark blue and its strip goes up horizontally
framing the painting at the top edge which I evaded. «the arrangement
adds Kanweilher will provide a very clear-cut and plastic image»(2).
Louise de Solages still life number 10 stands for a proof here, on the
blue on a yellow background in the rigid and floating double thickness,
in the plainness granted to geometric shapes: a clear-cut image, at
a standstill, statics prevails over dynamics.
One must agree on the static strenght of a painting. In the «Revue
d'Europe et d'Amérique» in 1912, Jacques Rivière
was one of the first ones to approach it in an essential text on the
current trends of painting». «We now understand, thanks
to its origin, the true meaning of painting.
It represents objects as they are which is to say not as we see them».
As they are in their static nature, we discover the objects not as we
see them in their dynamism. Thus Rivière adds : «paintings
always tends to give us their sensible essence, their presence. This
is why the image they form doesn't look like their appearance»(3).
This non resemblance sets painting free from all mimetic procedure.
There is no model. The essence of things is built while painting. What
makes the essence of things is no more than its transformation, but
up to when? We can't completely go along with Jacques Rivière
when he asserts that «these transformations are negative as well
as positive. The painter must replace these two values with others truly
plastic ones this time.»
This was true some time ago and applied to the cubists. This is how
Louise de Solages proceeds, for example in still life n°2 where
we can see very well how the shadow of the fruits has been replaced
by a very subtle distribution of the masses. And everything Rivière
said can apply to this painting : «the cubist gave up lighting
which is to say the direction of light but not light itself... He only
needs to substitute the blunt and unfair distribution of lights and
shades with a more subtle and equal one. He only needs to share out
without bias between all the faces the shadows which was bunched up
on some of them, he will use the small portion awarded to each and lay
on it the closest edge of another lighted face to enhance their respective
slant and divergencebelonging to the parts of the objects.» Having
said that, one musn't give up the perspective but rather transform it
because in this transformation the being of objects shows up not as
we see them. And Louise de Solages will never stop dislocating all the
membranes of its
perspective planes, to grasp or hold back the presence of objects. And
just as much as the presence will be embedded in the dislocation of
the perspective planes, instauring this static aura for each element,
the play on these planes, the dynamism will cover each of them. This
is
merely what linearity of writing can't convey: the dynamico static intrication
of painting.
Everything happens just as Henri Bergson points out when he wants to
convey the tension which is exerted between matter and energy and when
he compares the first one to filings and the second to the movement
done by a hand which runs ideally across the iron filings. But wherever
the point where it stops, the grains will instantaneously find a balance
and get coordinated. This also applies to vision and its organ. This
concerns the painter's vision and his painting, we could say. And Louise
de Solages goes further, from the schematization of shape, the better
the elements cristallize simultaneously and gather around her brush.
Whatever the point we stop to, each object is caught in the net of her
static energy which discloses the secret of the whole movement of painting.
Philippe Sergeant
Traduction de Caroline-Jane Guyon-Williams