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View Artist Resume
Painting and Supra-reality
Summarising a complex subject is a perilous thing, especially when
explaining one's own paintings. This said, the "worst case scenario"
never being certain, I throw myself into this overwhelming task,
knowing that, if images will always flow easily from my brush, words
should come harder to me …
When it comes to art, the first rule set by the artist is often
debatable, as it is always the technical reflection best suited to
his own personal universe, by definition subjective.
The other "rules" which are added to the first are accumulated brick
by brick and finish by making a "wall", which one can also call the
Style of the artist, and which, if the rules hold together
coherently, can be surprisingly solid.
This "wall" cannot be up for debate. Of course, one either likes it
or one doesn't - de gustibus non disputendum est ! But only the
quality, force and pertinence of the artist's personal universe can
be questioned, particularly viewed in the criterion of universality.
These aspects will be brought into question sooner or later, and a
good thing too, as this is the only way that Art can remain alive.
The maxim "Live what one paints and paint what one lives" is not
without danger for the spirit, but can one really be creative
without giving in to a taste for adventure and, above all,
adventure's demands?
And the World, prey to perpetual change, is full to the brim with
adventure. Thus, for the past half-century, a new situation has
evolved.
For the first time in the history of humanity a direct contact is
possible between all human cultures. No empire has ever been able to
create a link between so many societies.
In this historical context, building a universally authentic
artistic language constitutes a fantastic challenge to a painter's
creative capacities.
I intend myself to create a language, over and above the simple
search for the original or spectacular, vain aesthetics or fake
beauty, which actually would be the product of meetings of
apparently distant human cultures, of which our century is the
outcome - and from which, as everyone can see, the end result
remains unsure.
Cultural fusion, where the best of both remains, or on the contrary,
confrontation between the peoples of earth with the risk of losing
cultural treasures patiently worked on through the past centuries?
The period of creative intensity to which my work brings me -
starting with observing current life's realities, which we often
term "modern", a reality of so little spirituality in our various
homelands - leads me to double my efforts towards the Grail of "ultimate
human communion".
From Man's experience in his quest for the meaning of life and,
particularly in a universe that remains an enigma, where science
only sometimes helps, scientific dogma always disappoints in the
end.
I have a dream: one of a Human Culture forged through integration of
all Human Cultures, which would express itself through art, and
whose riches would allow a greater understanding of the universe.
It's not simply about "a melting pot", as we wrongly say, to "half-cast"
the different views of reality, but to see with eyes that possess
several cultural facets, searching for emotional, rather than
intellectual, coherence justified by no other rationality than the
artist's vision.
A feeling of "shift" in my painting, and a door opens in the spirit
of the viewer....
Here, as in every human adventure, temptation creates confusion.
Beauty is a source of temptation but apprehension about it can only
arise when the aim of the painting is not only to represent the
imaginary world of the painter, but has ambitions to evoke the real
world.
This pictorial language is figurative because I choose to speak the
most common language, the least "cultured", and therefore the most
universal. In my painting, effort is fact, less of form than of
foundation. The sense comes from the natural order of intuition and
fate's pitfalls, religious state state of mind (attention and
conscience) not from any particular religion, from the presence of
the mystery but not the enigma.
This language is also a communion.
I bring together peoples of the spirits, of the dead, the sacred, of
magic - all that human spirituality thinks of as powerful and
unique.
As in the time when one painted angels because one believed in their
existence rather than their symbolism, one finds in the present, in
science fiction or superheroes in whose existence only simple minds
and weak characters might believe.
This language has its order and its chaos. We can reach the "surreality"
of the "surmonde" of Malraux by the Art of Signs, such is the way of
its development - a way of life with which I have always felt
empathy.
It comes down to the artist to reflect on the signs and then to give
back to the viewer a universe, a vision; it is not for the viewer of
a painting to analyse the intellectual meaning.
It is one of the virtues of a "masterpiece" to permit the person who
enjoys it to reach a critical emotional mass (an analogy borrowed,
for explanation, from nuclear physics) leading to a state of raised
consciousness, awakening which allows a deeper link to the world for
the human beings.
Is not painting a chance for Man to reach the world of Truths?
Art below wisdom of course... but art none the less!
To do this, we must take a new look at human cultures in their
diversity, that is to say, from the present onwards.
This approach to world cultures, let us repeat, is devoid of all
Intellectualism, it is not particularly religious or even
humanitarian. It concerns rather a mystical experience (if the wise
man lives out his mysticism on a daily basis, art can only offer a
broken sequence), where in order to reach the "universal" or perhaps
the "absolute", one will prefer empathy - which in no way signifies
doing away with value judgements or blind submission - to cultural
centrism, the other label for the narrowness of spirit that, in the
case of art, always takes the sentimentalist path - a leading astray
of the sentiment - or the art of submitting a human being to the
tyranny of his emotions, an area of course where "intellect" seems
unfortunately the only recourse.
To have a new view of painting, the spirit, full of its own culture,
must allow the eye to look…. without a culture coming in between.
The work in immediate contact with the senses.
By a specific route through art one can reach a level of enriched
consciousness that changes one's interaction with the world, so that
one could say, with a little humour, that paintings reveal their "sense"
through the "senses" and not through culture, the utility of which
can be expertly exploited by training and education of the senses (thus,
visits to museums create chain reactions that open and structure the
senses) but rarely instead of them.
In this last case, it is intellect that invites itself to reflect -
this may be nothing more than a jubilatory exercise.
The reason for this is simple. Intellect analyses art, object of
observation, from the outside, whereas the senses, vision above all
in the case of painting, permit us to enter into the very heart of
art. In the river, not on the bank.
In the first case one is a spectator; in the second, one becomes an
actor.
One needs to feel, not to understand. Even if one can hope, that
this sensation-enriched experience through which one sometimes
passes when contemplating a work of art, moreover will help our
harmonious integration into the universe.
This intimate interaction with the work of art is an experience
without common measure that awakens the consciousness and allows it
to reach the imaginary in a more personal way and, if the work is
worth it, the "supra-reality" spoken of by Malraux.
It is perhaps not a case of transcending what is real. Neither is it
perhaps seeing "something else" which has been offered for us to
perceive, but rather seeing things differently.
The humility to see without understanding whilst perceiving
completely.
Scientific and philosophical reasonings themselves push us towards
humility.
Let us do something else when we admire a quasar, a sun that shines
like a million suns in the arch of stars? We don't fully understand
what we are seeing, but we can only accept what we see, even if it
escapes our understanding. We do it for a very simple reason, one
full of wisdom. We know that reality is more complex than our
capacity to grasp it, beyond our ken. This doesn't inhibit us but,
on the contrary, stimulates us.
In Art field, let us accept this as a capacity in itself; that our
senses serve not only to feed our rational knowledge of the World,
but allow us to experience the incomprehensible too, including the
momentarily incomprehensible (without mentioning what we cannot
reach but perhaps exists - what is around or beyond the Universe?)
The beauty of the World, the ugliness of the World, the force, the
depth and the subtlety of emotions, the control over the artist that
the visual sense exerts - all this has something hypnotic and
regenerating about it.
This awareness that there is perfection in the world, or that power
comes through truth, establishes in the individual a state of
serenity and confidence which I can only qualify as existential -
harmonious relationship to the universe, corticothalamic equilibrium?
- a little like when one is in love and one feels more alive, more
unusual than ever and even so in a strong connection to someone else,
having a euphoric consciousness of that other person.
Here, someone else, there, somewhere else.
This link, unlike one of love, does not cut us off from the outside
world but unites us to the Universe.
Painting in the 21st century
Let us take a walk down the road of the history of our painting.
A slow evolution to begin with, gains momentum suddenly over the
past two centuries.
In the beginning expression is figurative, painters representing a
mixture of true-life and imagination, people, things and landscapes;
art is an imprint of spirituality and faith.
During the 20th century everything changes.
Painting takes on the mission of representing "higher" emotions,
convincing itself that this can be found on an intellectual level,
no longer incarnated in known and immediately comprehensible forms,
but in ideas thrown onto the canvas!
The brain in place of the heart, the cortex rather than the thalamus
would mark a man as "cultivated".
From then on, the concept of the intellectual artist imposes itself
and the subject disappears from the painting: the era of abstract
painting begins.
Here in a few words is how the figurative became the abstract with
mention, of course, in so doing, of essential phases such as
impressionism where the subject becomes blurred, followed by cubism,
where, "analysed" and decomposed by the artist, the subject finishes
by becoming unrecognisable.
Successes in these domains are undeniable; because the figurative
resists these developments. However, this direction of painting
comes to a dead-end.
For in the same way as the human eye perceives nothing beyond
infrared and ultraviolet, there is nothing to feel beyond the
figurative, where this other art that is photography reigns, or
beyond the abstract, because when one hides subject, colour and form,
it is essentially the painting itself which disappears.
Further, with the idea of "Modernity" - a bandwagon easily jumped on
by a certain market - in its most intolerant sense, one often sees
it contrived (and in so doing, unfairly mixing up the genres) to
push into competition pictorial art and works from performance
artists and other reality-based constructions, that exactly belongs
to the art of Sculpture taken to its limits or to the art of Cinema
in its most radical expression, performances and installations being
filmed or not.
Constructions and Performances cannot be the future of painting,
because they just aren't painting. They could be the future of
sculpture, theatre or cinema. This quite revolutionary reality can
easily worry those whose interest in art is to relax and have fun
(indispensable elements in other respects), reserving the creative
domain for the "happy few" (often more happy than enlightened)..
So, is this the end of painting and must we accept it?
I have, for my part, one certainty: one can have faith in the
pertinence of painting for creating a common language for the whole
mankind and for permitting humanity to fashion together a world more
rich culturally, being more diverse and better integrated. This is
less to do with Good and Evil and more to do with Order and Chaos.
The error lies in wanting to paint ideas - the abstract - where
emotion is weak and not sentiments incarnated in immediately
identifiable forms.
Art, Beauty and the other Truths of the World, revealed by the
senses, must again become accessible to human beings in their
diversity and for this to happen, the contemplation of a canvas must
be more an emotional rendezvous than a pretext for erudite
discussion. Let us be proud but let's stop being pretentious!
Art is emotion and not analysis! There is no justification for the
dictatorship of intellect, which is neither a competitor nor a
master. Why is there this contempt for human emotion when everyone
realises its capacity for opening "the doors" into a domain where it
is difficult to see anything but virtue?
Such is the road I have consciously chosen, to rebuild a new way of
painting based on these essential principles inherited from the past
painters of emotion and the enormity of human cultures!
The undulation of touch creates a particular emotional vibration
that gives a sense of shift from reality, an internalisation.
"The success of a painting cannot be resumed by a formula",
correctly said Pierre-August Renoir. But there is nevertheless a
very simple truth: no need for explanations or private lessons to
feel the beauty of a sunset, all one needs is the sensibility… and
so it is with painting. On condition that one finds therein an
intense emotion from a representation of reality, which is
immediately understandable by everyone, and thus lets us see certain
essential truths; for if "superior" emotions exist, they are,
clearly, not to be found in intellect but rather in the spiritual
force which evokes in Man the conviction (or maybe only the doubt)
that Life, as tragic as it may be and as violent may be the empire
of the blasé spirits which leeches off our cultures, that Life is
worth living in the end!
Has not the poet found in his deepest despair, in contemplating a
woman's smile, in a sky over a plain, in children playing together,
painted on a canvas, reasons not to die…?
"The terrible night with its tremendous mouth,
Said: Life is sweet; open its doors!
And the wind told me with its untamed moan:
Adore! Absorb yourself in the beauty of things!
So it is that after a thousand years, alone, through the ages,
I return, oh terror! to these joyous hours,
And I hear nothing but wild sobbing
And the deaf passing of furious shadows."
"A Thousand Years Later" Poem from Leconte de Lisle
Text from
Jean-Pierre Brustier
Translation from Andrew Robinson
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