Francine LeClercq by Francine LeClercq

Francine LeClercq

A Verisimilitude of the Appearance of the Truth (Ink on paper) Ali Soltani, May 2015 On Francine LeClercq’s “I Am Your Labyrinth”, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, New York

Francine LeClercq is once again presenting us with a multidimensional apparatus consisting of a set of spatial as well as mythological figures and references pointing on the one hand to the centrality of the objective construction of the art object, and on the other hand, the decentralized expansive boundary in which a shifting viewing subject is continuously re-centered as the component of the work proper. The primary engine that drives the work is clearly thought to be art; the inquiry addresses the internal workings of this machinery and more importantly the source of energy that fuels its operation. Following a trajectory of site specific installations starting with her seminal solo show Opening in 1999 (p.33) , until now, and her gradual shift from the purely abstract expressionistic works wherein the formal properties of the work is wholly invested in the specificity of its material construct and support – to the figuration of texts and images in 2003 titled Paintings (p.39)– to Mise en [S]cène (p.25), shown in 2007 in New York and again in 2010 at the Turku Cathedral in Finland (p.31), a monumental reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” – to her effervescent installation of half suspended cells titled 3:2 (p.23) shown in 2009 – to Narcissus (p.12) founded on the work of Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus, consisting of paintings and photographs and culminating in a pool where a projecting figure of Narcissus arrests the viewer’s gaze in his, what haunts us from the depths of her practice as an artist is her assertion in all earnestness in the aphoristic “I am first a painter”. The phrase is impinged on the word “first” as it commits the speaker to the specific support of painting while

opening the language to entertain a voice that has not yet been uttered. The point in trying to grasp the matter, being, how does this proposition figure if at all in the current work vis-à-vis the general question of art. Indeed while at first glance it appears that her work increasingly seems to fall under the rubric of installation art, a closer examination of the work leads us back to re-read the phrase in a paired stanza of: I am first A painter; that is the phrase “A painter” supported by the patent Cartesian cogito of [I am] , notwithstanding within the outlines of a specific medium, be that the material incorporated in the formal armature of the work or the mental psyche of the observer/viewer. Furthermore, let us remember that along with other media, Francine LeClercq still paints, she has not dismissed or exchanged one genre of work at the expense of another, we are not aware of any attempt on her part to advance a one size fits all global ideogram that could indiscriminately be applied to all forms of art; but she has demonstrated that specific medium and context are critical factors of the work, in other words, the medium is understood to be forged locally specific to the work at hand. Finally, it is my contention that the work of Francine LeClercq insofar as it addresses/ exposes the machinery of art whether that be the mechanisms of transmission and reception, or the figuration of past subjects from the historical image repertoire, the process entails the re-enactment of the tenets of artistic discourse, and in so doing she must in the literal sense of the word necessarily take down or rather un-install the work containing an upheld value. This procedure of taking down an iconic work to

examine its content is nowhere more forceful than in her 2007 Mise en [S]cĂ¨ne (p. 25) where six large panels corresponding to the dimensions of Leonardo da Vinciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Last Supper have been brought to eye level suspended from the walls of the exhibition space. The cut-out contour of the protagonist and the apostles and the translucent whitewash bearing on the panels devoid of pictorialization, point to the true state of its referent painting that despite its status as one of the most iconic landmarks of art history and lavish revenues collected from tourists who queue for hours on to see it, is virtually non existent, the maestroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painting as early as its twenty short years of its anniversary was already in dire peril.

The table as the true site of the painting is actualized, given to the spectators who by occupying the void are at once brought to its field, made part of it. Yet we would be making an error in thinking that the illusionistic vacancy of the work is being substituted by the allegorical presence of the viewer, far from it; the decisive factor rests in the fact that the artist feels it necessary to use an icon, a thing of history as an instrument that effectively demonstrates its matter of fact phenomenological presence, pointing to the discrepancies between its blunt material thingness and a projected imaginary one, against which there is raised an awareness of contingent tactile aspects. Moreover this work marks a turning point in the work of

Francine LeClercq in the way the paintings are hung on a bracket away from the wall, therefore significant in that, liberated from their former pictorial arrest they assert a planarity that seem to merge with the space around it. We should mention that this notion was arrived at quite accidentally in the need to clear a protruding column in the gallery space, however decisively incorporated into the work in its second showing at the Turku Cathedral in Finland. The notion of the liberation of the work from the wall is given free reign in the all engulfing [3:2] (p.23) installation in which a profusion of rectangular cells held away from the wall by imperceptible cylindrical spacers, following the aspect ratio of digital graphic displays are encoded with an archive of images belonging to the gallery’s past and brushed over with a layer of thermochromic paint forming an opaque dark film over the respective image. The paint has the quality of becoming transparent with the increase in temperature passed to the cells through touch as spectators are encouraged to place their hands on the cells revealing the image beneath, thereby the role of the artist as the image maker is transferred to the viewer whose participation is crucial in the appearance of the work. The current work under the depictive heading of I Am Your Labyrinth, taken from Friedrich Nietzche’s poem- “Ariadne’s Lament” is a richly layered work in which the artist continues to recalibrate her convictions about the crucial roles of specificity, context and perception. In this instance the relatively limited space of the gallery and the added constrain posed by having to show alongside another artist is ingeniously compensated through the facility of a 1: 6 scale model of the entire gallery including the ancillary spaces, placed diagonally across from the entrance next to a glazed wall of the adjacent office. The dim ghostly appearance of the exhibition space reflected in the glazing makes it apparent that the placement is carefully considered to elementarize and incorporate the glazing as a visual element of spatial continuity through which a cluster of differently sized white tablets placed at random bearing what at first appears as

curiously amorphic black stains stretch horizontally into an indefinite perspectival vanishing point. While the illusory aspect of the reflective surface is at odds with the authentic certitude of its present double, the intention is not to draw away attention from its invested object, rather in the bilateral symmetry afforded, the reflective surface acts like a video projection screen, that in the quivering effect through the incident of light on its surface, relocates and frames the context as if trying to bring it into focus. Moreover, the horizontal trajectory of this fusion countered by the vertical axis adjoining the model space through its open top with the gallery space, forms an axiomatic crux that seems to act as some sort of binding device that knots the two spaces. It is at this crucial juncture that it is realized the model isn’t some toy replica model of the space or a tool of study rather an extension or a passage through which different scales and spaces shift and are folded into one another, in constant flux, as though on a perpetually moving ribbon of mobius strip. The inferred relation to the literary work “Alice in Wonderland” is obvious, both works chart the intertwining relation between perception and context through the growth or shrinkage of their components, however here the shift in scale is both pertinent and instantaneous without the agency of a narrative or an allegory; and yet what does it mean to dismiss a narrative when we realize that the blotted stains we spoke of earlier are non other but the mythic Ariadne herself ? More precisely her recumbent likeness as depicted in numerous statues since antiquity transferred by ink on paper offering different views and profiles. Except in one instance, where on an upside down tablet folded into the plane of the model, is revealed a full size portion of a sleeping Ariadne’s profile of the statue at The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we aren’t given a clue as to what other versions of the statue she might have used. What is striking about these images is the traditional technique of chiaroscuro that has been employed in arriving to a highly saturated figure against a stark white background that borders abstraction. In other words while the figure is folded into the obscurity of its own shadow as it were, the specific subject of the Sleeping Ariadne vis-à-vis

the double presence of a figure and its absence on a single plane ties the work to a crucial moment in the history of painting that had begun the slow eviction of illusionistic devices from the two dimensional flatness of its support. The use of life size statues for drawing was part of the formal training of artists in art academies throughout Europe where there was a repository of copies from different sources. Much smaller plaster casts of statues used by notable artists like Cezanne, in that they could be held by hand and seen from different angles was instrumental in challenging a fixed point of view through linear perspective. Matisse and de Chirico both carved their own small versions of the Sleeping Ariadne that appear in their work, particularly with the latter with whom it became a kind of obsession with the subject throughout his career. Placing the statue under the light from different angles and examining its long shadows led to his innovation of

using the shadow in stitching together disparate pictorial elements in such a way that both time and space are suspended, the ambiguity of de Chirico’s Ariadne series lies in a displacement that impinged upon its recumbent tenant, could either belong to time- we could be seeing the statue in different times in the same spot; or the subject- at a designated eternally fixed time on a different spot. It is significant to point out that this indecisiveness is reflected in the various versions of the statue in de Chirico’s painting, sometimes showing the statue in a state of half sleep half awake, her head resting on her raised hand as the statue in Vatican; and sometimes fully sleep with the head thrown back more like the model at the Uffizi Gallery although he drew from other sources such as the 1913 painting titled “Ariadne” in which the figure is shown in a foreshortened perspective seen from above clearly using Andrea Mantegna’s “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” as template for

Ariadne’s pose. But if de Chirico through the agency of- either orpulls the viewer into the interiority of its picture plane, it is the double negation of-neither nor- in the work of Francine LeClercq that situates the viewer in the work not as a tentative outsider contemplating a curious dyslexic scene, but as a native interiorized element subject to the introspection of a meta-perceiving bird’s eye surveillance, the inverted sleeping Ariadne’s profile looking down in the model disrupts the synchronicity of time and space through an Escherian paradox as if caught between two facing mirrors, facing down, Ariadne and the viewer coincide into one, dreaming. The aim in framing the entire art operation is made more evident by the fact that the administrative task of sending out invitation has been integrated into the work, a limited edition of cards have been numbered bearing stamps of Ariadne specially produced for the

occasion blurring the boundaries of how and where we should encounter art. Back in the gallery space, the full scale outline of the statue inscribed onto the body of the model by a continuous sinuous line tempts us in thinking we’ve been given the clue, that this is the Ariadne’s rope in her own outline that leads us out of our complicated journey, however on an adjacent wall opposite the glazing, thirteen drawings arranged in a perfectly regular orthogonal succession bearing the same technique of densely applied chiaroscuro draws our attention, this time depicting the Kiss of Rodin (p.10) in twelve improvised views of successive rotations in full circle. It is as though the rope, far from unraveling the mystery of our journey is caught in the eternal spin of a kiss, something that no matter how hard we try to define is best left to be felt.

The Kiss (after Rodin) , 2015 Ink on paper , 8 x 10 in. each (8 of a Series of 13 plates)

Polarities of Perception in the work of Francine leClercq Ali Soltani, 2012 On Francine LeClercq’s “Narcissus”, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, New York

Writing freely without counting the artist (yet) as the agent through which a work might come into being, art can be said to be the sum total of, the happy verdict of an interaction between at least two entities, a self proclaiming enunciator and its summoned addressee, the spectator; and one of the primary conditions that facilitates this transaction, at least when it concerns painting, is [ Looking: to turn one’s eyes towards something or in some direction in order to see]. Now returning to the artist, Francine leClercq has been occupied with doing just that, turning one’s eyes toward something, the question is why this is particularly significant in the case of this artist when after all, all artists put things on view to be perceived? To compound the question in hope of finding an answer, how does perception in the work of Francine LeClercq operate, turning to these seemingly weighty, shifting vectors as if the gaze itself in its respective orientation has suddenly expanded and solidified to an impenetrable prism transfixed forever as the immaterial material of this painter of voids, in other words, how does viewing become a component of the work, not in obvious reciprocity, the casual hanky-panky in the happenstance of a work and a viewer; but as an ungraspable fleeting material that its sense of loss is undeniable like a somatic sensation. Francine leClercq is a painter of mostly dripping vacuous fields that although they may address the viewer, or its other, at first glance, there is little to suggest that they are anything but what they seem; what we see in their blunt materiality vacantly looking back are mere peculiarities owed to aspects of their making i.e. the

application of medium on canvas, pigmentation, saturation and viscosity, centripetal or centrifugal flow having to do with density of material, centrality and margin, orientation, etc., etc., … And yet it is precisely in the presence of the viewer, to whom they address themselves that the seeming inward matter of factness of these works begin to contain something much larger than themselves residing outside their material construct, and we realize the primary perception we earlier talked about is a means to a different plane of things,the artist through the work is part curator part choreographer infusing the movements and postures about an arrangement in a specific space, and the viewer in this context is a recruited shape shifter, instantaneously the exempted perceiver, perceived in as it were, the concomitant scenario of a tableau vivant. In this regard the peculiar trans-historical links and references to specific notable works and their ever so dimly ghost-like appearance (or disappearance) under a pool of highly reflective material, casting doubt on the thing just seen as if it may or may not have been an optical error due to some mimetic mental construct, seem to invest the work in the destabilization brought about by the historical character of contemporary perception while at the same time, grounding it in its dialectical other which trails it like a foreshortened shadow. And this otherness which migrates between the abutted custody of a hazy precedent and some chanced appearance of a certain unknown, makes for a conspired situation whereas the work is at once, centered, depicting a fixed moment, and released within the anistropic spatiality of a situation with shifting centres.

The notions of gaze and perception are thus constantly in flux, not only because of the constant interchangeability of subject and object and not just because the doubt factor divests the gaze of its supreme authority on perception, but also through a subtle warpage of the perceptual field, a restructuring by which we see and assimilate things, a kind of force that pulls us down, I want to say gravity but one that is exerted by the horizontality of the artist’s studio where the work is produced. In practicality the site of exhibition at the SOHO20 Gallery painted half black down to the floor, reminds one of a dance set that will govern the choreography around a patchwork of fragments that don’t immediately seem to have a discernible order. The submerging effect evoked by the blackness below the standard visual line at 60 inches is an innovation, both, with regard to the normative heightened tension between hung works and their backdrop, and more importantly in this instance, as a device to inverse and restore to the work, the horizontality of its production that is otherwise countered by the verticality of their hanging as well as the uprightness of the viewer in front of it. The hung works insubordinately placed, diagonal to the viewing gaze pull the head and shoulder towards them. Here, this is not the gaze that is beholding the work, it isn’t the ‘I’ that is exercising its power, rather, we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a work, made part of it, refigured and folded parallel to the horizontality of the ground, as if we have just recovered from a fall, wrestling with gravity, pushing it down as we struggle to pull up, half

seated, our hands resting on a ledge, our arms erect and tensed supporting the arch of our torso peering over a ledge into a pool from where emerges a figure, our other, Narcissus, as Caravaggio painted us. Two ellipses on the walls, placed diametrically, one depicting a reflected Narcissus, the upper half of the oval voided, the amorous subject already departed, already united with its inverted image, and the other ellipse depicting a single knee, the bared projecting knee of Narcissus isolated and glossed over without its reflected counterpart, testifies to a former present and anchors the loss; together, they frame and form the ethereal megalith, the stereoscopic figuration of absence. We have spiraled passed and beyond Caravaggio, from image to text to the everlasting words once put by Alberti: “What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?”

Narcissusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Knee, 2011 Oil, resin on canvas, 36 x 42 in.

Narcissusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Other, 2012 Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in.

[3:2] September 2009/Soho20Chelsea Gallery, New York

The work consists of painted cells measuring 3 x 2 inches; 3:2 is the aspect ratio in photography now adopted for the LCD screens of some of the digital devices such as the cameras, cell phones and the likes. The clear association is to our bombastic ability to fix and register images on the fly with the aid of these devices, the new format of our perception. In concert halls, press conferences, in streets and parks, in more or lesser degrees the scenario evokes the image of a vaporized display of memories scattered about like gas particles in suspense, fully liberated from the captivity of their once fleshy bunker, the body. The half apocalyptic half ephemeral scene where knowledge is thus remotely held, in a (yet) senseless, un-felt state seems to carry with it the potential nearing of the death of sensation. Hence the gallery’s classic role as a match making box between the subject and the object, the see-er and the see-ee, is employed to facilitate a têteà-tête with this contemporary condition and restore, however temporarily an atmosphere of sensation or the sensible. In this respect anything other than direct exchange between the work and the viewer would render the situation picturesque. Painting, the medium by which this operation is motivated would need to be charged, sensitized. The cells are painted with a single colour, a coat of thermochromic ink is then applied to the surfaces of each cells causing variations in colour depending on temperature and location, the proximity of bodies and heat exchange. It is an experiment whereby art is the moment of a mutual dependency fermented by an active participation of the senses.

Installation: [3:2], Soho20 Gallery, New York, 2009

Ghost in the Machine Ali Soltani, 2007 Francine LeClercq, mise en [s]cène, September 4-29, 2007 Soho20Chelsea Gallery, New York

In the thick of opalescence, as if we are suddenly brought in to witness the posthumous findings of an autopsy, a group of things: some lexical, some material, carefully arranged, some fixed, some indeterminate; intentioned, spontaneously, coincidentally, in a rare consortium of words and image, evidently, audibly, mutely, point, form, charge, discharge a dimmed sparsed re-collection that blurts out in various curious sound forms: The Cenacolo or, The Last Supper; in some inflected form it has the sound and shape of La Cène; a less quaint one sounds something like, Shom-eh Akhar. But what is it doing here?! First a few words on The Last Super: Roughly 480x880 cm, the picture was painted by Leonardo da Vinci between 1495 and 1498 for the refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie in Milan. Like the central figure it depicts, the painting is chronologically flanked by a long list of works that predate it and those done in its aftermath. As early as 1517, that is less than 20 years after its completion, evident cracks and flakes appear on its surface. In 1568, the Italian architect/painter, Giorgio Vasari lamented that: “there remains nothing but a blurred stain”. In 1584 Gian Paolo Lomazzo in his Trattoria Dell’arte della Pittura, Scoultura et Archittetura, declared that “the painting is in a state of total ruin”. Interestingly Lomazzo had gone blind seven years before breaking the news so his account must have either relied on his earlier recollections or by way of word through friends and colleagues. What is extraordinary, the irreversible truth is that this most talked about of all paintings in which the

slightest gesture has sent all in a frenzy in feverish pursuit of its subject stirring dispute amongst the artists, writers, poets, historians, the moral police and the scientist; the painting that in spite of itself has served as the evidence par excellence of so many findings, the famous Cenacolo, had long ago quietly departed the frozen uproar of its devoted narrators, virtually non existent when they erupted. The observer who is finally let in after long queue might be unprepared, unaware that if allowed to see the work in its authentic present state stripped bare of the mascara of its restorers, the thing the blessed gaze would encounter is likely to be a nebula of pigments powdered across a seemingly immeasurable void, with no discernible protagonist, no apostles, no sign of annunciation, no sacrament; and where is the genius in that? The semblance must do, it is more plausible, more aligned with our inherited memory. All is needed is a little boost of authenticity issued by the proper authorities for the right price of course, a good waiting in line and 15 minutes of allotted time with the Maestro’s masterpiece; the observer is rejuvenated. In all irony, the truly genuine depiction of the inherently commodified and kitsch aspect of The Last Supper has been made evident in none other but Andy Warhol’s tour de force exhibit at the Palazzo Stellino directly across the street from the church where the departed Cenacolo was first painted. To speak in such terms however is to render the work strictly visual, an attribute of which we only have an after image, whereas the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie for which the work was tailored, made its

The Last Supper Untitled,2007 Gesso on MDF, metal brackets, overall 96 x 252 x 14 in. (6 panels) Installation: Mise en [s]cĂ¨ne, Soho20 Gallery, New York, 2007

outward extrusion and the sole survivor that bears upon it the trace of the maestroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s touch, has hosted, confided and spawned the thoughts of generations of spectators, from the monks who joined the supper and shared their bread, the chained prisoner when at the dusk of the 18th century the refectory was turned to a prison for a brief period, the expert with the scalpel and the rejuvenated observer. 510 years later in New York, Francine LeClercq presents a scenario, a kind of machine-ry in which disparate disjointed parts conjointly ignite a certain thing, a certain readability that might or might not sum to a meaning but nonetheless point to the condition of its existence. This dichotomy between existence and meaning, the relation and oppositions between some thing and what it signifies, the subject and its decalogue or the artificial collection of rules and codes that frames, validates and crops its possibility Ă la Paul Valery is at the same time the contrasting schism that prevents the formation of an image into a single

whole; the work of Francine leClercq is never complete, its fragmentary nature only temporal contingent upon the presence and biases of a single viewer; conjoined with another, our collective notion of the work would resemble the molecular state in liquids, loosely held, flowing to find its final form within the confines of its vessel whether that be a single stretcher or the space where its placed. However, where in the former the tentative contingency of the work was warranted by a seemingly wet and viscid state of acrylic and the resulting peekaboo of the incidental appearance of the viewer on a reflective puddle-like surface; In the latter, this reciprocity is charted along the moving path of the viewer, in other words, the viscous element is the spectator itself leaving its wet trace as if by some capillary attraction guided by an unforeseen itinerary of a vagrant gaze. Hence the selection of an icon as a widely recognized and accepted something seems to be nothing short than a coup against the scholastic practice that rigidifies and wraps the work under a single one size fits all ideogram.

It couldn’t be more false however to think that the work is geared to battle all past meditations, Goethe himself ! Good God! Rather, the impulse is similar to a curious child who having dismantled an object to understand its construct but faced with the difficulty of re- assembling it awaits the patronage of an instructor, whether that be the present grown up in the room or the tricksy hoodoo of the ghost of Christmas past. In other words what we have are the remains of a once intact body, catalogued, laid bare, de-authorized seeming to say; “taketh,… you who shall re-assembleth me in any shape or form have understoodeth the art-of living.”

Installation: The Last Supper in Turku Cathedral: Francine LeClercq, Andy Warhol, Pauno Pohjolanen Turku, Finland, 2011

An Odyssey Ali Soltani, June 1999 On Francine LeClercq’s installation “Opening”, June 1999, Soho20 Gallery, New York

“Non art, anti-art, non-art art, and anti-art art are useless. If someone says his work is art, it’s art.” Donald Judd

Francine LeClercq has no such claim; and although she does not dispute the above (she cannot), she declares: I’m first a painter. The conscious distinction she makes between painting and art is telling enough but one which at once puts the work in transit, between specificity and generic, modernity and formality, form and expression, object-hood and theatre. In short the work has been put to risk, unable to find an asylum in neither domains, its only salvation is to remain a minor. But why (or how) then this incarnate Greenbergian allegiance in the specific assertion: “I am first a painter”. In spite of the evident schizo and binary oppositions, painting is first and foremost the very medium by which she proposes to make these dichotomies appear on the surface, a coup d’état whence the traditional relation of the work in the presence of judgement is taken over by [the judgement in the sovereignty of work]. In other words, a replacing of the primacy of interpretation to that of ecology. Which is not to say that critical judgement is effaced, quite the contrary it is necessarily put to work but in such a way that its boundaries, its set of values are constantly challenged, blurred, diffused by other factors, other values, displacing it from a centralized capital to a node in a meshwork. So while the work sets off on an ontological economy of canvas, frame, brush and paint, the process permits singularities triggered by time, space, planes, depth. The autocatalytic nature of this procedure resists catalysis, the raw neutral field, its indifference, dislocates the core to periphery. The approaching inquiry of the viewer, the gaze is freed from one fixed point to another, to the margin, to space. To paraphrase Remy Zaugg: “ ...they exhibit

the exhibition itself ”. On the other hand, the striking emptiness of the picture(s) once again alludes to Greenberg: “Something of the harmony of the original square of white canvas must be found in the finished painting”. But if all that is said should be true, if the work stands in spite of itself, shifted from the core to the margin, from a centralized domain to a decentralized gateway, in the process of re-territorialization, a map in the remaking, then precisely notions such as borders and boundary are indefinite. The work in this regard in all its self referentiality is never finished rather like an alloy it is more than the sum of its parts, that is , one that displays global properties not possessed by its individual components. In contradistinction to the facts, the reconstruction of evidence, the ontological survey, the Eureka; the truth, the absolute value , the death prophecized by the moderns, is not some conclusive episode as if poisoned by the very things that molded it to its existence. It lies momentarily dead in an elongated perhaps everlasting moment in the interval of a pulse. To breathe some life into this , to resurrect the soul from some morbid archeological remains there must be found the helical trace from Mondrian’s romantic vision of painting’s total absorption in life to Shakespeare’s Juliette, for it is she who holds the key to this mysticism, who like Orpheus must live the death, enter it in life, temporarily, in order to truly die to release for all eternity the parfume of desire, the essence. The title chosen for her show: “Opening”, therefore finds a curious resonance, more like an announcement than a title, its almost ceremonious tone seems to invite more than just a gathering as if a call

Installation: Opening, Soho20 Gallery, New York, 1999

to a ritualistic event to witness a sacrifice, the object being the work itself, the paintings. But that is not all; the word offers other readings, many venues of which we have spoken of only one. Opposite the door, the entrance, spanning some sixty feet of wall surface, with the entire wall as a weaving loom and a tapestry of paintings composed like the weft and the warp of the canvas, there appears at first an ethnographic undertaking in search of some “timeless origins of work”, a seemingly symbolic gesture, the color coming from a different source illuminating a nebula of virgin canvases (at last). It isn’t so! The dream of the painter, the blank canvas will have to wait. The picture already made are not Ready Mades, first because they are hand stretched by the artist, but that is unimportant, there is a more compelling fact at work, a shock, the canvas is altogether discarded off, there remains only the paint (brush strokes) stretched without its support. Hence these flatly literal hybrids of the essential constituents of painting are constantly changing, exchanging their retrospective relation like the chame-

leon, appearing, disappearing. And while either by sheer mass or by the visual substitution of the canvas by the paint, there is an inherent vision of the work of art as a monument, that which in the words of Heidegger, stand “but not as the full presence of the one whose memory it bears”, the elemental instruments of the work still persist, actively put to the test, experimented on, on the verge of thresholds, traversed, kinetic, autocatalytic, in process... And finally, back on the loom as in Homere’s Odyssey that owes its entire characterization to Penelope’s weaving, if it can be felt that we are in the presence of a work, the thread is in her hands.

Opening, 1999 (panel details) Acrylic paint removed from canvas, wood, 12 x 24 in. each

Twins, 1998 Cast acrylic paint, wood, 4 x 10 in. each Private collection USA

The Painting and the Gorgon Ali Soltani, 2003 Francine LeClercq, Paintings, September 2- 27, 2003 Soho20Chelsea Gallery, New York

More often than not, a work is subject to a mechanical conspiracy between its maker and the recipients, which conceals its truth. The more facts are volunteered, the more accessible the work is made to be, the more transparent the intent of the maker, in short, the more authority exerted over the work, the more repetitive are the nods of affirmation. Indeed, the use value of meaning would be reduced to null were it not for the dynamic automata of this hiccup, the transaction by which the two integers, the author on the one hand and the nodding heads on the other happily interact to forge meaning. In this regard, perhaps due to a certain dimness in Francine LeClercq’s work, whether in the morphological images of the drawn works, the catalytic drips of the meshworks of late 90’s, or most recently the crepuscular glaze of the poured works, the striking aspect, is first and foremost, the almost primitive urge to smear the surface, as if under the burden of some guilt, one is hastily compelled to bury all proof, erasing the trace of anything by which the slightest meaning could be discerned, rendering it insignificant. The force of contradiction in this assertion is however too great, guilt is made significant only when it is tied to a value system, the behavioral code, the convention of meaning, the most devoted agent of which, language, in its highly evolved script form, is itself a by-product of the same archaic impulse of smearing, marking, painting. To speak metaphorically, there has always existed a curious relationship between a thing marked and what it re-presents, a hide and seek be-

tween meaning and the truth it reflects; that in the verb reflect: to express a thought resulting from reflection, there is inherent the highly reflective nature of a truth itself, the very quality that allows it to be camouflaged the instant a glance is cast on it, depicting everything but itself, blind to sight; and yet, if its presence is felt, it isn’t that by virtue of its absence, it has traditionally been summoned as a myth, something higher than it may be, but that the stuff of reason, the systems of representation, if they are to be utilized, are offered no other ground, no other choice but to be pulled into its gravitational force; but alas without friction, so that the moment they begin to exert their weight, they slip, and it is in this slippage that the sought thing might ever so dimly present itself. And it is at such a moment that in the syntax, latent in Francine’s paintings, in the sometimes evident pain taken to produce meaning out of the relationships and articulation of parts, at once random and organized, divisible and whole, that we find the language, contrary to all expectations, has instead taken leave of its communicative powers, resigned to a mucus like outpouring of a delirium as oblivious to discourse as Dali’s melting clock to time. Nowhere is this state of flux more present than the strong sense of evacuation one gets from the catalytic works where the drips of paint on the edge of the canvas seem to be moving away in gradual motion, having left as it were, a geological trace on the surface, or equally the sense of expulsion through the incisions made on the canvas, the paint suspended in a seemingly perpetual viscid state.

Installation: Paintings, Soho20 Gallery, New York, 2003

In comparison with the new works, whereas the same kind of attention to the parts is still operative, in the presence of more variables, the inflection on syntax in all articulateness has had the paradoxical effect that the language is made even more impotent, divested of any claim to self-referentiality. Notably, while the centrifugal dispersion in the catalytic works, as in Marcel Duchampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rotoreliefs, does this by having the unsettling effect of never arriving to a static moment for the eye to rest on, the semi mirror like quality of the current works preys on the eccentricity of the viewer, we find ourselves suddenly ingested, looking out from the gut of the painting, seeing nothing else but what it sees, only then to be expelled from it, akin to the whaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nausea that vomited Jonah back to the shore. This perhaps is one of the most compelling aspects of the work, the diffusion of visual register in viewing the work to a powerful awareness of being in the presence of a work. Furthermore this presence is itself thrown to a backdrop of a larger whole in the clear reference made to hanging, which we see in the protrusion of nails, in the displacement of the painted area within the stretcher, or in the syncopated desig-

nations etched onto the surface. As a whole, a clear attempt is made to inverse the negativity of the wall as a mere hanging surface to take an ontological role in the positive survey of the field proper, without the illusionistic pictorializations of a tromp lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;oeil. Another peculiarity is the reference made to certain works in history, delineated, captioned to indicate the artist, date, size of painting, etc., as if the work has been turned to a catalogue, an essay on painting, and yet at the very moment of enquiry, we find that the words are too buried under the paint to be legible, their semantic function made defunct; the title, un-titled given to the paintings therefore, finds a particular resonance in that, more than just a cautionary stance to avoid to project meaning into the work, it enunciates the very action by which the painting deflates any meaning that could be read into it, a kind of shield that throws the petrifying gaze cast on it back to its viewer.

Untitled 2003-1 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in.

Untitled 2003-2 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in.

Untitled 2003-3 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in. Private collection USA

Untitled 2003-4 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in. Private collection USA

Untitled 2003-5 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in.

Untitled 2003-7 , 2003 Acrylic, resin on masonite, 36 x 60 in. (detail above)

Olympia , 2003 Resin on masonite, 60 x 72 in. (2 panels)

Warp (Orange) , 2000 Acrylic, urethane on canvas, 28 x 84 in. (3 panels)

Green Painting II, 2004 Acrylic, urethane on linen, 36 x 36 in. Private collection USA

Green Painting I, 2004 Acrylic, urethane on linen, 36 x 36 in. Private collection USA

Green Paintings, 1998 Acrylic, urethane on linen, 12 x 12 each Private Collection USA

Green Paintings , 2001 Acrylic, urethane on canvas , (series of 8), 4 x 10 in. each Private collection USA

Black Paintings , 2011 Acrylic, urethane on canvas , ( modules detail/ series of 8), 4 x 10 in.

Papillon, 1998 Acrylic on linen, 36 x 42 in. (detail above) Private collection USA

Untitled, 1998 Acrylic on linen, 36 x 50 in. (detail above)

Un-titled I, 1997 Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in. Private collection USA

Un-titled III, 1997 Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in. Private collection USA

Residue, 1997 Acrylic and urethane, 9 x 10 in. Private collection USA

Threshold I, 1997 Acrylic, oil on canvas, 8 x 9 in. Private collection USA

Blush, 2018 Acrylic, urethane on panel, 8 x 9 in.

Untitled, 1999 Acrylic, oil on canvas, 9 x 10 in. Private collection, France

Red Rose, 2002 Acrylic, oil on linen, 12 x 13 in. Private collection USA

White Rose, 2002 Acrylic, oil on linen, 12 x 13 in. Private collection USA

Carmen, 2017 Acrylic, oil on panel, 14 x 36 in. Private collection USA

Untitled, 2002 Acrylic, urethane on canvas, 6 x 72 in. Private collection USA

Cross (orange), 1998 Acrylic, urethane on canvas, 24 x 24 in. Private collection USA

Cross (black), 2003 Acrylic, urethane on wood, 24 x 24 in. Private collection USA

Cross (white), 2002 Acrylic, urethane on wood, 30 x 30 in. Private collection USA

Cross (black), 2015 Acrylic, urethane on wood, 24 x 24 in. Private collection USA

Cross (white), 2013 Acrylic, urethane on wood, 24 x 24 in. Private collection USA

What Is Painting? (after Baldessari)), 2013 Acrylic on paper, 18 x 22 in.

PeripheralARTeries Magazine meets Francine LeClercq An interview with curators Josh Ryders, Dario Rutigliano and Melissa C. Hilborn July 2017

Artist Francine LeClercq’s work grounds in the process of painting and the “idea” of painting, with a deeper focus on a complementary dialogue between materiality, content, the exhibition space, and the encounter with the viewer. Adressing the viewers to a multilayered visual experience, her body of works that we’ll be discussing in the following pages, successfully attempts to trigger the viewers’ perceptual parameters walking them through the liminal area in which perceptual reality and the realm of imagination find a consistent point of convergence. One of the most impressive aspects of LeClercq’s work is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of inquiring into the notions of displacement, sequences, viscosity, morphological and semantic registers, curatorial and historical elements: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. P: Hello Francine and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid background and after having graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Architecture you nurtured your education with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, that you received from the School of Decorative Arts, in Strasbourg: how did these experiences influence the way you currently conceive your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the notion of beauty? FL: Hello and thank you for having me. I expressed interest for drawing and painting at a very early age and was encouraged to develop my skills through intensive training in private studios and at the Municipal Art School of Belfort. Soon after my graduation, I received full scholarship for the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. My answer to the exam committee for why I wanted to enroll in the Interior architecture department was that “I needed to solve problems.” I don’t recall having had drafting or construction courses and later found myselft quite unequiped when I did have to do my first professional internship in an architecture office, but what I learned was the ability to expose problems. I soon realized that if I were to go beyond an utilitarian discipline like architecture, I could create questions without having to offer a permanent solution. This notion of permanence, or rather its antonyms such as variability, instability, alterability and fluidity are the core of my work as they imply a constant remise en cause.

And this brings me to my (current) conception of beauty, constantly debating Augustine’s question of “whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or wether they give delight because they are beautiful”, or simply put, between the effect or the origin of beauty. Having had a classical education, I can’t deny my appreciation for harmonious proportions sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios i. e. the Golden Section or the canonical sculpture, but these place beauty as something purely objective and I must concede to the emotional effect of beauty, often associated with pleasure. A perfect balance is when I neither attribute beauty exclusively to the object or the subject, but to the relation between them and even more also to the situation and environment in which they are both linked. The question is, can we still speak of the aesthetic experience in terms of beauty-that is a set of established criteria to judge a work? What I find more attractive, is not beauty per se, but the parameters that define it. My interest lies in exposing the system and values of aesthetic judgement not for what it says but for what it doesn’t. P: Your works convey a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification. Would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up? In particular, are your works conceived and created gesturally, instinctively? Or do you methodically transpose geometric schemes? FL: Though I have provided images that at first glance seem to fall into the category of installations,

Debbie Rasiel photography

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and as you have pointed out, my artistic production also entails singular paintings, objects, and architecture. And while the works share visual similarities, I can’t speak of a formula or a “one size fits all” approach, but of instead of methodology where specific procedures solve different problems within the scope of a particular discipline. To give an example with painting, it is the very material constructs essential to the becoming of the work (the stretcher, canvas and paint) that directly dictate their own creation, whether in the “catalytic”works (1), where, under gravity and repetitive rotations, paint drips frame the edges of the canvas, or in the “DNA” series (2), through incision in the canvas, leaving the paint in a kind of suspended viscid state. In all cases, my creative process is always an interplay between conscious and unconscious, from investigations within the accumulation of intellectual ressources out of which ideas emerge, to a sudden intuitive feeling of “obviousness” derrived by a culmination of associations that will in turn, have to be validated in the later construction of the work. P: For this special edition of Peripheral ARTeries we have selected [3:2] (3). What has at once captured our attention of your inquiry into the notion of art as the moment of mutual dependency fermented by an active participation of the senses is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of [3:2] would you tell us your sources of inspiration? And how did you select your subjects?

FL: The title of this work, [3:2], reffers to the standard ratio found in camera and mobile devices LCD screens, effectively (in a sense) the new format of our perception. The small rectangular cells, liberated from the wall by impercievable cylinder spacers, are coated with a layer of thermochromic paint forming an opaque film. Filling the gallery’s walls, the scenario evokes the image of a vaporized display of memories scattered about like gas particles in suspense. The paint has the quality of becoming transparent with the increase in temperature passed through touch as spectators are encouraged to place their hands on the cells, revealing a myriad of old photographs belonging to the gallery’s past. Utterly dependant upon the visitor, the pieces can open like an album of universal memories, or remains absolutely abstract and unapproachable. Citing the exact measure of our portable mirrors and opposing analogue photographs to them, the works via the concept of traditional painting, expose the ephemeral nature of the novel perception. Furthermore, it asks to challenge the role of the artist as an image maker by transferring it to the viewers. Hence the gallery’s classic role as a match making box between the subject and the object, the see-er and the see-ee, employed to facilitate a tête-à-tête with this contemporary condition and restore, however temporarily an atmosphere of sensation or the sensible. P: Your works address the viewers to challenge their perceptual parameters and allow an open reading, with a wide variety of associative possibilities. The power of visual arts in the contemporary age is enormous: at the same time, the role of the viewer’s

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disposition and attitude is equally important. Both our minds and our bodies need to actively participate in the experience of contemplating a piece of art: it demands your total attention and a particular kind of effort—it’s almost a commitment. What do you think about the role of the viewer? Are you particularly interested if you try to achieve to trigger the viewers’ perception as starting point to urge them to elaborate personal interpretations? FL: The viewer is primarily a conscious subject without whom, existence/ any existence has no meaning simply because the relational field for the thing to be sensed doesn’t exist, a space that opens or is impinged upon the presence of the viewer; in this respect whether in my paintings or installations I always strive to locate the viewer not as an outsider but as an encoded other whose role and thingness is constantly shifting, in other words as mediums go, the spectator is very much a material component of the work. I am always fascinated how the work changes in the presence of one or a number of people. With one individual the work is relatively fixed, as the number increases, it is much more diffused like the swimming décors of Matisse- but I don’t mean that in a general sense, the decision to place a work on view requires a bird’s eye view of the situation that is being set up, a conceptual knowledge of the totality of the work that supersedes everything else, the question is how this knowledge is imparted, or at what critical moment the viewer finds itself in the presence of the work, and more importantly at what point do they merge and become one; in other words, by internalizing the viewing subject,

the work seizes to be a ‘look at’ and opens itself to its engulfing exteriority- metaphorically speaking, if there is a narrative quality to grasp the internal logic, then the work is a door from where the perceiving subject steps out and perceives itself being perceived. P: We like the way Delft Blue Eyes (4) challenges an inner cultural debate between heritage from the past and traditions that carry on to this day: despite the reminders to traditional figurative approach, your works is marked out with a stimulating contemporary sensitiveness. Do you think that there’s still a contrast between Tradition and Contemporariness? Or there’s an interstitial area where these apparently opposite elements could produce a proficient synergy? FL: If history is an indication, there is nothing more traditional than the will to progress- which is to say despite its connotations, the longevity of tradition is dependent on the tensions between a long held belief and emerging concepts that constitute a new era- to which it must adapt and evolve. With Delft Blue Eyes, we (myself and my partner Ali Soltani) had to work with the collections of Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, an institution dedicated to historical works and crafts belonging to Dutch culture. The competition called for a contemporary object or work corresponding to a particular collection selected by the participants, so the notions of present and past (or a former present) and with it the manifest issue of a particular culture belonging to its respective epoch, defined the basis of the work- that is the insertion of something in time

which is an uninterrupted continuum within the full breadth of unfolding historicity. Perceived in this way history is no longer a compilation of linear succession of distant events, and instead an instantaneous landscape of intensities marked by the peculiarities of a given time that could be interchangeably linked. We took the image of 17th Century Delftware plaques which was the high craft of the period and grafted it onto non-prescriptive contact lenses. Both are products that have flourished because of high demand and thus emblematic of their respective culture- on the one hand a product of the Dutch Golden Age characterized by its distinctly tactile quality attained through the manual manipulation of firing and glazing earthenware- and on the other hand the intricacies of an impalpable digital age represented by a technological veil on the iris that like a chameleon as it were has become one with the object it is fixated on. Thus in the implicit fragility of a crossbred porcelain gaze as the site of perceptual happenstance, a reference was made to Marcel Duchamp’s notion of non retinal art and the Readymades both with respect to chance encounters and choice, and more importantly by the realization that the navigational path of modernity to progress doesn’t have to be one way, nor straight. What is at stake is the notion of progress itself. P: I Am Your Labyrinth (5) provides the viewers with an intense, immersive experience and as you have remarked in your artist’s statement, your work focusses on a complementary dialogue between materiality, content, the exhibition space, and the

encounter with the viewer: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience and how you see the relationship between environment and your work?    FL: It seems to me that with the advent of the internet, the domain of public sphere is shifting or I should say expanding from the exclusively collective spaces of streets and urban squares to the stealth realm of domestic life where it reincarnates as the virtual space of networks and the world wide web receding into a labyrinthine pixilation of some kind of media screen. On the other hand the casual urbanite is entrapped within a maze of partitioned institutions each catering to a different purpose with relative sufficiency, but the notions of the institution and the public remain at large and whether or not our relationship with art in this artificial construct is tenable. In this sense the reappearance of Ariadne as the eternal liberator that could offer us a way out, served as a narrative geared towards a critic of how we see and experience art and the whole machinery of its production. As the gallery space was being shared with another artist the construction of a 1:6 scale model of the gallery space not only compensated for the remaining area for the fully site specific installation, it effectively served as a gyrating crux through which the white cube imploded and expanded out, and blurred the normative distinctions between the perceptual and conceptual space. Similarly by incorporating the administrative aspects of the gallery and its reliance on infrastructure in or-

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ganizing an event such as the invitation cards which were numbered and the mailing stamps that depicted my images of Ariadne, an attempt was made to reach beyond the confines of the gallery space and reframe our notions of perception through an installation at large. P: Despite to clear references to perceptual reality your visual vocabulary, as reveals the interesting Mise en [s]cène (6), has a very ambivalent quality. How do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice?  FL: If you consider the notion of mise-en scène in set design, it consists of the staging of actors on a scene where its formal qualities is founded on a narrative that follows the telling of a story, a theatrical or cinematic likelihood that is mounted in front of a seating audience some distance away. What it shares with other arts is that it posits itself to be seen, designed to captivate the attention of a viewer, it relies in more or lesser degrees on some credence that is conveyed by content, structure, or both. What interests me however is the cross section of this business of viewing, that (emotional) field that holds the two parts, the viewer and the viewed glued to each other. To speak of the real, some years ago I saw a film by Abbas Kiarostami called Shirin in which the camera is turned to the viewers watching some epic Persian love story. We, the real viewers see the movie directly but we perceive the love story obliquely, guessing,

through the contorted faces of its audience. I said real because at the end that is all there is, the question isn’t so much what we are looking at, rather how we are seeing it which I take to be the mise-en scène in my work. The Mise en [S]cène that you refer to, in its literal translation: To put on view- with a bracketed “S” before cène- (French for Il Cenacolo /The Last Supper of Leonardo daVinci), is an installation consisting of six panels that roughly add up to the same size of the original mural which literally flaked off and is virtually non existent were it not because of the cosmetic mascara of its restorers. You could argue that thing on view is 500 years of kitsch making that draws its credibility from 15 minutes of allotted time given to thousands of visitors that line up to view it. My installation was about this condition of an absence that is summoned by the spectator as a full presence to fill a void as though in a séance. With respect to the above, if there is an element of representation or narrative in my work, I would say as far as I am concerned, it is tangential rather than figurative or illusionistic, this is as much true in my installations as in my paintings which are mostly the outcome of their material construct. P: Narcissus (7) inquires into the notions of gaze and perception: we daresay that this stimulating work is about the experiment to make visible volatile phenomena: would you say that the way you provide the transient with sense of permanence allows you to create materiality of the immaterial? FL: I would say perception has a materiality that is

felt through a force which like a soul, is in itself unseen but acts through subjective and objective factors. As an artist I have to be sensitive to how I set up a field of attraction. Placement, trajectories and speeds of movement and approach are the primary concerns which help me to decide on a certain arrangement, this is as much true for my paintings as it is in my installations which by necessity share curatorial and choreographic aspects. It is not without risks since the narrative component of curatorial work can easily be confused and be passed for design. With Narcissus, there was the additional element of a referent deeply invested in psychoanalysis that rests not in the content but in the subjectivity of the viewer which is never accessible. On the other hand, the striking aspect of Caravaggio’s Narcissus insofar as it related to my preoccupation with painting, was the latently modern posture of a kneeled figure looking down, utterly immersed, not too unlike a painter mesmerized by a pool of paint on the floor, and quite in contrast with the usual upright viewer in front of the painting. So a choreographic idea presented itself whereas a hybrid viewer/painter submerged in a pitted blackness of paint as it were (the walls were painted black below the standard 60 inches eye level) and guided by some invisible force-field would have to echo the physical genuflect of the mythical character and by diverting its gaze downwards, restore the horizontality of the paintings’ production which were done on the floor of my studio. P: British multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced stated “that works of arts often continue to

evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur”. Technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works that haven’t been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? FL: In a world increasingly consummed by computer screens and instantaneous telecommunications, I believe the main difference in perception is the absence of the original sense of aisthesis or apprehension by all senses due to the annihilation of locality, temporality and physical presence. Though I am attaching great importance to spatial phenomena directly interwined with current time experience, very interesting perceptual typologies are emerging through technology. To give an example, I just participated in a guerilla project consisting in uploading an artwork that would automatically be seen by anyone logging on a dedicated site but only if you were to be present at a specific geolocation and for as long as another image was uploaded by someone else. Here notions of duration, presence, institution, and censorship were totally challenged. I have a sense that emerging concepts such as the increasing synchronicity between production, presentation and distribution, or the changing relationship between originals and copies among other, are going to influence the way artists work, from customizing

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originals, staging copies, or maybe, to just archiving the attempt to create. P: Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Francine. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? FL: Thank you for your thorough questions. As for this last one, future is not something that I can predict. The work may take a path on its own and the question is how I will evolve with it. Lately, I have been interested in “automatic object detection”, a image search tool on the internet. Images are represented as vectors preserving not only their visual information but also their semantic concepts. Playing around with one of my image (model of I am Your Labyrinth), I was able to see it matched with a filing cabinet and even bathroom fixtures! It is a little bit that dreaming where quite unexpected scenarios emerge and supply the subconscious. I don’t quite know what form (if any) the work will take so I will leave it at that. In the meantimes, I am making objects… with my hands.

Untitled 2016, Acrylic on Paper , 9 x 13 in.