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Regarding the work I have undertaken - where I have painted and sculpted what I have seen, heard, felt, lived, understood, endeavoring to be a witness to what is taking place in our times - people have given me their point of view, have made comments, criticisms whilst, on the one hand, placing themselves outside the subjects that I develop, the society that I describe and, on the other hand, relating everything they saw in my work to me personally.
I am not the first nor the last painter, sculptor, to be confronted by spectators of the psycho-commentator type, who, in what they say avoid taking a committed stance.
Vincent van Gogh was seen as being depressed all his life. His life was however one of seeing and perceiving the living world. His life: what he describes of the world in the world. A world, a reality where only a few men have dared to go. It makes me think of Antonin Artaud and his testimony: Van Gogh, the suicided one of society.
Goya also had at the end of his life his so-called "black period" whereas at that same moment he himself said he was at last free to paint without having to take into consideration the feelings and whims of spectators and clients.
Is it not more comfortable for any spectator who is aware, to commentate until total insensitivity sets in saying that a painter and his painting is dark (and I don't know what else), rather than looking at the light it casts and what it reveals of society - a society which he is part of and whose story he is also writing.
Michelangelo already drew attention in his time, when someone reported to him that Paul IV wanted to correct his Last Judgement because of certain nudes offending decency: "What here pains the Pope is just a little nothing that can easily be corrected; let him change the world, then we shall change the paintings."
Rather than turn their attention to what the painting is saying, ... so many people prefer to theorize about the arts, to construct representations, frozen or pepped up systems of sentimental drives, without enriching art itself. What can one say on this subject of modern culture, of how things are discussed, of fairs, of a modern museum, their architecture becoming more and more a "mirror" on which our mercantile times reflect themselves without however reflecting anything, without opening onto reality! Can one believe that in this economy of meaning resides an "artistic talent"!? Can one believe that selling oneself which, over a century ago was the worst of things, has today become so easily proof of quality and merit?
Let us look back for a moment. Let us stand back like a painter facing his canvas who, in times past, still knew how to do that - without for one moment losing sight of what was happening in his time!
And then, let us look in front of us at what clever commentaries often shroud paintings today - silencing what they are saying...
I read this one day about a Rembrandt painting called, The painter in his studio:"The studio is empty like the walls. A table, a large mortar for grinding the pigments. In the centre, an easel with an enormous painting, one hundred times larger than the picture we are looking at, a painting that we can only see the back of and, blinding, the pure, the divine white line of the side covered in chalk and glue, suspended in its creamy winter light as much as in today's. A line of pure virtuosity which, four centuries later, could hold its own in a canvas by Tal Coat, Barnette Newman or Olivier Debré".1
What am I meant to understand here? Expressed this way, Rembrandt could also be, as was said of Cezanne, a precursor of the origin of abstraction?!
And what does this bring?
What has been reached and matured here of history in our history?
In art, I met one day this seed which - amputated in its fertility, amputated from the gift that constitutes it - like a blind power planted in the heart of a man, developed like this: " Painting is not a question of sensitivity; one has to usurp the power; one has to take the place of nature and not rely on the information it gives you." 2 Regarding what is described and said here, how many were also going to become mediocre painters and sculptors, daubers (to take up the expression once used for certain paintings)? How many others can take themselves to be artists or to own a work of art when they see at their feet a board covered with some droppings of plaster, drippings of paint made by the drying of a brush, bits of pvc which remained stuck there whilst they were repairing the drainage of a washing-machine after repainting their apartment (and more). Taken up in this confusion of means of expression and what is today considered to be creative, there are even people who have told me that my work, consisting of paintings, of sculptures and of writings, was not different in its form from the concept of an "installation". But I shall not go into the multitude of potential interpretations. I prefer to try to understand thoughts such as this: "One is an artist on condition that one feels as content - as " the thing itself" - what non artists call form. Because of this one belongs to a world which is the other way round; because now all content appears to us as purely formal - including our life." 3
In what I express through painting, sculpture, I try to express what is there, what has been created for over a century by our modern societies, called civilized, developed or developing.
Would you say documentary films witnessing the barbarism of our way of life, were dark, tortuous, torn works? Would you also say of photographers, of journalists, of film makers who through documentary films, writings speaking of genocides, of famine, of the putting to death of the earth and the sky, of manipulations and experiments of all kinds on (for the moment!?) animals and plants ... would you say of their work that it comes out of their imagination, out of their world? That they are the expression of tortuous, dark, torn men and women? That it is technically well done, but the subject needs to be reviewed. That it is not very positive and that you would not exhibit that in the public square of a village, of a town, in your house? That as far as art is concerned, all these little people, plants and animals are long out of date ... That one should make people dream, see, give free rein to imagination, to innovation, to love, to moments of happiness, without judging or being judged, that is, without there appearing on canvas, in a newspaper, in a film, in the expression of a face, the shadow of our responsibility in what is coming to light and is really happening in our life.
Between darkness and light, what truth can raise the earth as the seed of a tree is able to do? On focusing attention on the sky of our times, on what the angle of the light in the curve of the celestial dome is writing over there, it is not a question of the tree verifying in its ascension a predestined destiny or of a "going towards a God" in what it is not able or no longer able to carry. It is not for the tree to see itself as the representation of a mass of organized, programmed, random or ordered particles which, despite a chance meeting, carries a destiny.
No, the sun bent down into the dying breath of the Earth. Midnight rang. The blood of the night, coagulated in the crow of the cock, flowed early. At sunrise, a cock crows, he carries the responsibility of his crowing. It is for us to do the same, to chose ourselves, that is, to write our destiny. That is probably what was in the Grail Cup that the knights of old defended with their life: the question of responsibility.
Careful! I am not saying that each man is guilty of the putting to death of art, of the Earth, but I am saying that he is responsible, as each man is responsible for his actions.
Talent is something that only certain men have or receive at birth, they say.
This kind of thought is only for the lazy.
In fact, talent is a baggage which clarifies us as to our responsibility.
And it is a question of sharing the content of this gift with others, without forgetting the world, nature, life, in order to help to consciously perceive the responsibility we have in the work that we chose and in the choice repeated until accomplishing a life.
Here, the task is thus that much greater for each of us.
Otherwise what ?
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