Dialogue                                                                                                                                    january 2009

First of all, it’s very hard for me to talk about painting. I generally have more emotions than I have words to describe those emotions.
But I will tell you how confused I am by your recent work. I envy those who are never around paintings.
A cousin of mine came around this morning out of curiosity and, while admitting his utter ignorance of painting, told me he was won over by the exact thing that had “revolted” me – these sudden breaks between the sections of a diptych or a triptych.
The first time I saw them, they looked artificial to me, as if they too deliberately skewed any order that might be there inside. This was in your studio, three weeks ago. When I went home, the diptych on my wall suddenly looked so still.
And when I looked at it again this morning, “still” was not at all the right word. For it kept moving all day long. This part of the apartment gets some morning light but light that comes from the side and razes this landscape. I get the feeling that I’m seeing almost everything in shades of yellows, greens, touches of red, simple, angular and perhaps imperfect, shapes. In the evening, under artificial light, the same shapes seem almost to inflate vertically, to be redder and cruder, almost haughty.
The light of some days makes these pictures almost impenetrable and I feel almost rejected. And then, on other days, I stop to look at the endless small subtitles of tone, detail, landscapes of colour and other variations.
Anyway, back to my confusion.
The paintings in your studio appeared to me abruptly dissimilar, even though they formed sections of polyptychs. Even so, I thought I had rather quickly “tamed” the phenomenon. But I hadn’t really. When they were hung, I had to admit that I hadn’t tamed anything at all.
I don’t know who is taming whom, but that’s what it comes down to.
One thing is clear: I will need these next few days, in fact at least one month and a few weeks to try to see (I’m not even trying to understand, at this stage) something in what looks like a combination and that seems so asocial.
In fact, that’s how I started, with what is so asocial. Why, after all, do they look so asocial??

Pascaline

Under neutral neon lighting, I confronted the diptych that hangs opposite the staircase; my own confusion gave way to a sort of consternation: how is it possible to do that?
Either I recognised this painting, and it started to become impossible to recognise myself as the painter, or things happened like this: this painting, on the day that you came to choose the paintings for the exhibition, was the one that was last “finished” during about fifteen work sessions during which nothing had happened, when, little by little, I had started to give up, when my relationship with this painting became somewhat polarised. One on the one hand, I could resign myself to this “state” and say out loud: “I did what I could”; on the other hand, I could both rejoice and be reassured in seeing the outcome as accurate and, hence, necessary.          
What do I mean by “accurate”?
You put a negative spin on the word “asocial”, which means walking, indifferently, frontwards or backwards, looking at my diptychs in one direction or another, from left to right or right to left, indifferently. 
Is the rupture that splits and unites the “fragments” of my paintings a mere tool, a device that is irrelevant to what I’m saying or, even worse, to my “concern” – in a word, an artifice – or is it a disjunction through which the painting is constituted, a discontinuity that can be presumed to have something to do with the profound causes of the painting?
Do the “fragments” accompany and thus bear testimony to a "default“, in this case, the contamination of one fashion by another, the insertion of what is properly considered to be part of a dialogue, keeping something or someone connected with something else, with an “other” in a written form of language, meaning a language that is readable and, in this case, “visible”?
One last point, and the most important one, regarding dialogue; dia (“par”) logue: it is impossible to distinguish between intermediary and means without noting the proximity of these two notions and the fact that both are in the category of what is an instrument and attribute of the action. So, after that little point of vocabulary, let’s get back to painting, where any “action” and even war seem to suggest the fashions that were talking about.
By the way, you told me you had more emotions than words to describe those emotions. You don’t really need many words.
  
You have presented your perception of the paintings by saying that they are composed of elements that are asocial. Do you mean that they don’t carry on a “dialogue” because they lack words that are sufficiently singular and “local” or because they are structured by no “orientation” or “meaning”?  Are the fragments of polyptychs, in fact, couples or triads of warriors in the throes of a somewhat heated but unintelligible conversation and with no apparent relevance to their respective functions and ranks?  Have they stopped on the side of the road after getting lost, to try to get their bearings and to march on as soon as they can?      

I told you how upset I was after the paintings were hung. In my studio I work in, and with, natural side lighting. I paint through various ways of penetration and diffraction between and through the layers of glaze (i.e., a certain technique for applying the material, a certain speed or slowness, etc.). Everything is on the level of phenomena that require extreme alertness. Keeping my mind and my sensations in this plane of combat constitutes the concrete and paradoxical prerequisite for separating my “concern”. “Present-separated” – present because it is separated – this awareness, if that’s what it is, has no eyes, no view, no vision, no throat, lips, or voice.
So that was how your arrangement – these neon lights whose mono-directional beam crushed the glaze and shrank the chromatic balance – made me see something else.
Retrospective.
As I sat on the stairs across from this just finished diptych, I asked God to cover my eyes with ashes. Right away.

Our soldiers may neither march alongside one another, nor converse with one another. If you wish, you can make the most fanciful assumption, that these battlefield warriors have better things to do. They are exploring another path; they are lovers. 

Robert