A F R E D TO R R E S CO L L A B O R AT I O N
The Art of Reverie BY C A RT E R R ATC L I F F The sea is bright blue, the sky is pale. Raking perspective sends a row of columns from the foreground to the horizon. Fashioned in the Doric style, this stonework brings to mind the ruined temples at Paestum, in southern Italy. A man with two suitcases stands half-hidden by the two nearest columns. On the beach below, two small boats lie just beyond the reach of the placid waves. Rendered in oil on canvas by Bob Lescaux, this could be a picture of a perfectly ordinary vacation spot on the Mediterranean. Yet there are anomalies. If we suppose that the man with two suitcases is of normal height, then the columns are far taller than any the Greeks or Romans ever built. And why is he wearing a hat and overcoat on such a sunny day? Why do the boats on the beach look so small? And what are we to make of the clouds in this luminous sky? To the left of the row of columns they have the drifting insubstantiality we would expect. To the right, however, they have acquired the outline of an immense ocean liner. This is startling, all the more so because the outline is so clear. Everyone has seen faces or animals or bits of geography in the clouds, but those images are always ambiguous and of course impermanent. By contrast, the cloud-ship in this painting, Steam, 2005, looks as if it will hold its shape for as long as its voyage requires. Lescaux invites us to imagine that a cloud could be at once cloudy and as permanent as steel. At this point, it is tempting to talk of Surrealist paintings—not flurries of line and splotches of color that cover the canvas at the behest of the unconsciousness but, rather, carefully rendered images that André Breton called “dream photographs.” These were precisely rendered pictures of impossible things: the limp watches of Salvador Dali, for instance, or René Magritte’s levitating men in bowler hats. Dream photographers have a place in Lescaux’s aesthetic ancestry, no doubt, yet it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on them. Surrealism in all its variety was a continuation of the great shift in sensibility that began in the 18th century, with the early stirrings of modernity. Exploding into the extravagances of Romanticism, the process continues to this day. Guided by a utopian agenda promising a union of dreams and ordinary reality, Surrealism tried to convert the energies of the Romantic imagination into a revolutionary program.
Left: Bob Lescaux, Vapeaur d’Eau (Steam)
Left: Bob Lescaux, L’heure des Thés (Tea Hour)
Though the revolution never occurred, Lescaux and the other artists in this exhibition continue to reimagine the real. Their purpose, however, is to not to defeat reality, as Breton, Surrealism’s quixotic theorist, hoped to do. Rather, they inflect the real with speculation, wild conjecture, and allusive plays of wit. Thus they help us see that reality is not precisely what we think it is. It is much larger and stranger. And it is not always subject to a strict accounting. In Lescaux’s world the familiar laws of perspective are not in force. Clouds are not always amorphous condensations of atmosphere. In Seb Janiak’s skies, clouds can have the solidity—and grand configurations— of landscape in the mode of the sublime. If we continue along this path we may well arrive at the conclusion that this exhibition of work by nine artists shows us glimpses of nine worlds, each distinct and isolated from all the others. But this is not the case. The artists included here are all inhabitants of our world and that is what they depict. If their imagery looks unfamiliar it is because they have found new ways of seeing what the rest of us see with the eyes of habit. Refusing to let perception sink into a permanent routine, these painters and photographers withdraw from the world a bit. Detaching themselves from their usual ways of seeing, they suspend immediately practical concerns and give themselves over to reverie, that state of full—indeed, of heightened—consciousness in which ordinary things float free of their usual definitions. When that happens, everything that appears to be firmly assigned to a circumscribed place in the scheme of things begins to reveal unsuspected possibilities. Floating, drifting, swirling dreamily from moment to moment—these are states we associate with reverie. But if reverie reveals new possibilities, surely some of them will concern the nature of reverie itself. Lescaux’s cloud shaped like a ship—or his ship with the translucence of a cloud— reminds us that reverie is not only dreamy. It is also willful. Revelatory, it insists on its revelations. Yes, says Lescaux, a cloud can be cloudy and have, nonetheless, a firm and recognizable outline. There is a subtler insistence in the paintings of Elaine Thiollier. At first glance, it looks as if she were a descendent of the Impressionists and determined, like them, to record on canvas the look of the sunlit world. But the warmth in her paintings is not that of the sun. Or not solely. Tilting toward a passionate orange, her palette conveys the feelings that well up when reverie returns her to certain favored places, the ones she pictures for her audience—but first of all for herself. The willfulness of reverie is always an assertion of the self, of the individual’s right to a distinctive vision. The rest of us are of course fortunate when a visionary individual is an artist and makes her visions visible.
Right: Eliane Thiollier, Village Provençal (Village in Provence)
Eliane Thiollier, Le sous-bois (Undergrowth)
Among reverie’s revelations is the manifold complexity of things. Nothing is what it is without being its opposite, at least potentially. If reverie is willful and insistent it can also be calm, a watchful waiting to see what will emerge from a spell of quietude. Olivia Boudet takes us to the edge of sleep, where every image flirts with invisibility. In this border region between dreams and the familiar world, there is darkness or, sometimes, an expanse of light. Capturing this hypnogogic luminosity, Boudet’s canvases turn the sky blue or beige or gray. These are the colors of depths that would be welcoming if they were not at such an overwhelming scale. The surfaces of her paintings are small and yet they are so smooth, so expansive, that they conjure up a boundless infinite, an uncontained region where there is no means of establishing a human measure. It is as the edges of her canvases were helpless against the abyss of inviting color, the attractive void that tempts us to lose track of our own borders and, ultimately, our sense of personal identity. It is here that the logic of reverie comes into play, insisting that no conclusion is final. Further developments are always imminent. Ignored by Boudet’s intimations of the infinite, the edges of her canvases, reassert themselves. They do not, however, deny that her fields of color potentially boundless. Rather, they insist that a potential can impose no absolutes. Discrete forms, finite and endowed with Euclidian clarity, are still possible. Moreover, the edges themselves supply the elements of these forms, as Boudet’s fields of color become the sites of starkly architectural presences: stepped skyscrapers, ziggurats, and pyramids— all of them built from straight lines that reiterate of the canvas’s edges. Having conjured up immensities that reduce the human presence to nothing, the artist introduces emblems of that very presence in the shape of monumental buildings. And to show that there are no hard feelings between the human and the inhuman, the measured and the measureless, her reverie paints this architecture in hues that lusciously complement those of her infinities. In Boudet’s paintings, there is an affinity between substance and void: both are hazy and illuminated by a subtle refinement. Or refined by a subtle illumination. In any case, her art reinforces a further assumption about reverie, that it reintroduces us to insubstantial things—remembered qualities of light, phantoms of thought, ghosts from landscapes visited in childhood. And of course it does. Yet reverie is primal. Preceding rational thought and the practical concerns that occupy so much of our attention, reverie is in sympathy with that most basic and solid of things: primal matter. Thus it puts us in touch with the very substance of being, as in Bernard Pierron’s paintings of elementary shapes afloat in indeterminate voids.
Left: Olivia Boudet, #90
Olivia Boudet, #122
Bernard Pierron, Puzzle Turquoise (Turquoise Puzzle)
Because his images do not represent immediately recognizable things, we say that they are abstract. Nonetheless, reverie frees us to imagine that Pierron is a realist of sorts, a painter of things that are recognizable, now that we have seen his paintings. His shapes seem to be in motion, taking their outlines from their velocity. They are streamlined and then, as we continue to look, they acquire the aspect of bright islands anchored in dark seas. Flat, they display multiple outlines that suggest a relief map’s indication of raised elevations. Do Pierron’s shapes make common cause with the flatness of the canvas or do they rise above it, to form luminous plateaus? Are they static or has he caught them in motion, as they flash into visibility for an infinitesimally short moment? Is he a map-maker or has he invented his own cloud chamber for the revelation of hitherto unsuspected particles of matter? The point of raising these questions is not to answer them, for that is impossible. The point is to let these interpretations lead us onward to the possibility that Pierron shows us the interior of some crystalline substance, cut and polished to a high luster or forms of life that are as much mineral as vegetable or animal. Speculations like these occur at the inauguration of thought, when the mind is first becoming aware of its powers. So this artist’s images of primal matter return us to the primary stages of our own being. In a photograph entitled Impression of Summer, 2005, Judith MartinRazi shows a whitewashed building beside a quiet pond. All is calm and reassuring. For those who have not traveled to Afghanistan, her photograph of the Royal Palace is Kabul is not so familiar and a bit unsettling. Populated only by a solitary bicyclist, the courtyard in front of the palace has the air of a gathering place for inscrutable forces. And Martin-Razi’s picture of a woman shrouded in blue and huddling on a sidewalk in Kabul evokes a way of life difficult for most of us to imagine. All these images are in full color. Martin-Razi also makes black and white photographs. Here, contrasts are harsh and it is sometimes difficult to extract a clear idea of a subject from the flurries of fibrous, shimmering form the artist highlights against fields of black. The art of Martin-Razi follows two paths at once. Each path is distinct, even opposed to the other, yet they now and then intersect. In Moon of Stone, 2005, a white oval—almost a circle—floats on a black field. Here a small stone impersonates the moon and finds a pair of counterparts in a color photograph called The Game of Go, 2005. This title refers to the Japanese game in which players move small, polished stones across a gridded board.
Left: Bernard Pierron, Le Partage de la Nuit (The Sharing of the Night)
Shown in close-up, two black Go counters are reverse images of MartinRazi’s white stone-moon. With this reversal she brings her full-color world of buildings and people into contact with her black-and-white world of elemental forms and substances. Though it is easy to see these two worlds as separate, even incompatible, the artist persuades us, ultimately, that they are one. Her sensibility generates them both and we sense her presence in every corner of her oeuvre, despite drastic shifts in light and scale and subject matter. Thus she lends the unity of her being to the rest of existence, the sprawling universe that ordinarily seems so thoroughly at odds with itself. Seb Janiak, too, is a photographic artist whose work has developed along several paths. A recent series shows the wings of butterflies and other insects arranged in patterns that invoke the involuted beauty of blossoming orchids. Translucent, transparent, iridescent—these natural forms have been induced to impersonate other forms that are just as natural. Centered on fields of impenetrable black, Janiak’s images do not gather light so much as radiate the authority of willful artifice. The artist has achieved a crystalline clarity, a stillness that immerses his forms in stretches of time immeasurably long. For the life of a crystal seems eternal. But when we see these forms once again as insect wings they seem frozen in a moment so short it escapes the flow of time. As we continue to look, wings turn back into orchid-petals and time is unfrozen. We sense the serene, almost imperceptible pulse of vegetative life. Then, in Janiak’s pictures of roiling, light-filled clouds, he proposes a violently agitated temporality, a suddenly dramatic sense of form, and new vision of primal matter. Drawing vision deep into atmospheric whirlpools and riptides, Janiak’s cloud pictures lead us through turbulence to a patch of calm blue sky. These resolutions of the visual drama recall the glowing quietude of his wing-flower-crystal images. And of course wings imply skies. Yet the connections between these two bodies of work serve less to link them than to point up their sharp differences. For Janiak as for MartinRazi, reveries of primal matter liberate the image from the prison of a consistent style. Yet consistency need not always be confining—a point that recalls the works of Elaine Thiollier, who always paints with the same touch, the same palette. Nonetheless, she never locks her imagery into a narrow range of meanings. It would be reasonable to say that Thiollier shows us the world coming into focus. And yet every possibility, however powerfully it struggles to realize itself, also implies its opposite. Caught up in the reverie of Thiollier’s art, we could understand her as persuading the world to lose
focus, to give up its familiar specificity and return to its original state. For she too is a painter of primal matter and that is why her forms look evanescent even at their most solid. One could argue in the name of objectivity that her images are distorted by her feelings and thus inaccurate. The next step in this argument might be to say that, if her feelings could be extracted from her houses and awnings and foliage, her paintings would not be so high-keyed. No roofs are as orange as hers, not even at noon in Mediterranean summer. But here the artist could appeal to the first axiom of reverie: we cannot extract our feelings from the objects that capture our attention. Without an admixture of the subjective, there are no objects. And no objectivity. Without the subjective, there is nothing. Admittedly, science joins with common sense to deny that existence depends on our subjective experience. Like scientific endeavor, everyday life proceeds on the assumption that whatever truly exists is independent of our individual feelings and beliefs. Reverie never disputes the truth of this assumption, nor does it question the findings produced by this rational approach to the world. What reverie tells us, however, is that the abiding truth of things is in their meaning and that meaning is the work of the unencumbered imagination. It is created by each one of us, individually. As exemplary sources of this creative energy, artists invite us to join them in endowing the world with its significance—its life. I am setting up no oppositions here. By saying that individual reverie generates life I am not saying that the shared, impersonal methods of science are deathly. I am saying, rather, that insofar as the world matters to us it is our own invention. From this belief follows an unexpected corollary: matter is not anonymous. It is not an objective finding. As the ground of experience it is inevitably personal. Thus the metaphysicians are on the wrong track as they seek to establish a concept of being that every mind will be compelled to accept as logically necessary. There is, for us, no one true concept of being. Perhaps there is no such concept at all. Being may well be a quality of feeling or an object of faith. In any case, Thiollier and the other artists in this exhibition who give us vision of primal matter—Pierron, Martin-Razi, Janiak—suggest that there are styles of being, which develop as individual sensibilities shape their experience in distinctive ways. To exist fully is to mesh one’s own being with the primal style of the world one has imagined for oneself.
Above: Judith Martin-Razi, Jeu de Go (The Game of Go) Below: Judith Martin-Razi, Lune de Pierre (Moon of Stone)
Seb Janiak, Mimesis (Series): Hibiscus Trinium
Seb Janiak, The Kingdom (Series): Above
If there are individual styles of being, then existence must elaborate itself in distinctive moods. These range from Lescaux’s playful grandeur, tinged by melancholy and memories of the commedia dell’arte, to the emphatic contrasts of Horst Widmann’s images, with their heavy charge of glamor. In the art Michel Plaisir, the prevailing mood is a pensive cheerfulness. He pictures a seemingly untroubled world full of pleasant surprises. A handsome visitor stops by with an armful of tulips. Equally handsome animals and birds manifest themselves with a clarity that feels hallucinatory. It is in the slightly uneasy feeling prompted by Plaisir’s hyper-clarity that we sense his willingness to let reverie do its work, which is to disentangle the mind from its certainties—to permit, that is, unforeseen possibilities. Look closely at the flesh tones in Plaisir’s rendering of the young man with flowers and you see that his astonishing meticulousness has inflected luminosity with shadow. We might think at first that he is following an age-old practice, using passages of gray to model the volumes of face and body. In fact, he is doing that. Yet he is also doing something nearly impossible to describe, which is to deploy tonal variations in a way that insinuates a voluptuous darkness into the palest highlights. In dreams, vivid images emerge from the oblivion of sleep, and I find no better word to describe Plaisir’s realism than dream-like. This means that, despite the legibility of his images, he is nothing like a realist. With his play of light and dark, he encourages reverie to invoke the two poles of primal being. Consequently, each of his figures, whether animal or human, is the site of an ellipsis that evokes all that is. For that is where everything is to be found, between the light and the dark that, for the imagination, are less opposites than intimately linked modes—or moods—of being. If Plaisir is not a realist, then Jean-Claude Farjas certainly must be. Look at the precision of his images. Sunlight hits water with a familiar intensity. Mountains serrate the sky just as we would expect and a wild cat stretches with typically feline grace. Looking again, however, see that Farjas’s landscapes have an unexpected orderliness. Objects recede from foreground to middle ground to background at a stately tempo. Sometimes a cliff or an immense building extends from the side of a landscape like a piece of scenery moving in from stage left or stage right. We could say that Farjas’s realism is a scrim, an extremely transparent one, through which we see a world poised for dramatic revelations. Turning to The Guardian of the Kingdom, 1997, we wonder whose kingdom this might be. More important, what is the elephant guarding? Because a painting is not a theater piece we know that no drama is about to unfurl. No revelations will be forthcoming and our questions will go answered.
Right: Michel Plaisir, Les Flamandes Roses (Pink Flamingos)
Michel Plaisir, La Visite Inattendue (The Unexpected Visit)
Jean-Claude Farjas, Le gardien du royaume (The Guard of the Kingdom)
Jean-Claude Farjas, L’estuaire du Pactol - (Estuary of the Pactolus)
And so we feel frustrated, but only until we realize that, out of the perfection of our ignorance, a kind of understanding has begun to evolve. For it occurs to us sooner or later that the elephant guards everything, the full range of narrative possibility, and this amplitude is the subject of the painting. With The Estuary of the Pactolus, 1991, Farjas comes as close as any artist in this show to telling a story with a clear-cut moral. For it was by bathing in the river Pactolus, near the Aegean coast of Turkey, that King Midis rid himself of the touch that turned all things to gold and thereby rendered them useless. If one’s food is gold, one is not wealthy. One is threatened with starvation. The legend of King Midas is a warning: do not fixate on just one goal, no matter how desirable. Let reverie reveal the desirability of a plenitude of things—and the desirability of plenitude itself. Horst Widmann seems to challenge this wisdom, especially with a work entitled Fetish. After all, a fetish is the object of an obsession designed precisely to exclude the world’s variety. A fetishist is prey to a need to focus on a solitary thing, to envision it utterly, a need Widmann symbolizes by showing X-ray images of his motifs. However, reverie permits nothing to be simple or obvious, and if we spend enough time with this artist’s imagery our usual definitions suffer a certain slippage. We glimpse ambiguities that deserve to be encouraged. It helps first of all to note that Widmann does not present ordinary X-rays in their gray anonymity. Transforming them with hot, even fluorescent colors, he infuses them with the energy of the urban night, the glamor of film and fashion. With the darkly luminous hand of Thank You, Peter, 2011, he invokes our lives as social beings. The figures of Blue Velvet, 2010, levitate in the borderland between sheer sexuality and love. By evoking the order of the garden, that emblem of civilized life, Lavender Tulips, 2010, conjures up a backdrop for this artist’s other themes. Thus the narrow focus of Fetish takes its place in the sprawling multiplicity that constitutes our world and provides reverie with the habitat it endlessly revises and revitalizes. I have been discussing the art of reverie in two senses of the phrase. In one sense, it refers to artists who open their art to ceaseless currents of speculation, conjecture, and waking dream. In another and a larger sense, the phrase points to the possibility that reverie is not merely a force that on occasion spirits us away from our mundane concerns and delivers us some unforeseen destination. It is, in Aristotle’s word, a technê—an art. It is active, not passive, and therefore it can be cultivated, as the painters and photographers in this exhibition show us, by example. Furthermore, as representatives of the art world of France, they remind of the shape taken by recent history. Right: Horst Widmann, Merci Peter, (Thank you Peter)
From the earliest days of the republic, American artists followed France’s lead. So did the artists of many other countries. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Americans felt a new sense of independence. New York took the place of Paris as the capital of advanced art and New Yorkers paid little attention to the world beyond their city—or, to be more precise, beyond the island of Manhattan. In recent decades, borders have been blurred. Visions have enlarged and the world of art has become international. Nonetheless, French art is still underrepresented in New York, which has meant that the legacy of a great visionary tradition has not been felt for decades. Hence the significance of this exhibition, for the artists it includes are the heirs of French Romanticism, of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and the entire band of Symbolists, and of the Surrealists, too—though, as I mentioned earlier, there is no hint of Surrealist dogmatism in the work on view here, only of Surrealism’s willingness to set aside the reassurances of a banal rationality. So the work in this show is unfamiliar and yet it is not, after all, foreign. As the title of this exhibition notes, we share the same sky. We share as well the power to determine for ourselves the nature of everything the light of that sky reveals.
Left: Horst Widmann, Les Velours Bleu (Blue Velvet)
This catalog was published in a limited edition of 500 to accompany the exhibition. Mon Ami WE SHARE THE SAME SKY May 30 - August 31, 2013 In collaboration with Alain Briscadieu-Farjas & Albert Zdenek Jr. Fred Torres Collaborations, 527 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001 fredtorres.com Introductory Image: Jean-Claude Farjas, Le Temps des Loups (The Period of the Wolf) Closing Image: Seb Janiak, The Kingdom (Series): Deluge All images courtesy of Fred Torres Collaborations ISBN: 978-0-9857992-2-9 This catalogue may not be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system and/or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic media or mechanical, including illustrations, photocopy, film or video recording, internet posting or any other information storage system without the written permission of Fred Torres Collaborations. Photography by John Rohrer Catalogue design by Kristofer Porter Cover design and arrangement by Daniel Knowles