Two simultaneous exhibitions in Paris (at the Fournier and Putman galleries) offer a view of this artist’s recent drawings and feature an “echo chamber” resonant with forty years of his interests and researches.
——— I am surprised by the dimensions of Chambre d’écho. You have made a lot of installagtions, which you call “drawings in space,” that are much larger. This time, we have a kind of box, a compact work that contrasts with the scattered nature of the previous
ones. My works, and this one above all, have a relation to the body, and the proportions of this parallelepiped are almost the same as those of a four-poster bed. With me, a work is always the result of another earlier one. The idea for this one goes back about five years, to an earlier series titled “Réserve inaccessible.” This series was a record, made in unfixed blue pigment on carbon, of all the “memory objects,” as I call them, that I have collected over the years with a view to making them into a work. I had gathered a large number of these starter objects and I had already used some of them but not all. They were like a kind of accumulated treasure. I then asked myself how I was going to fit them in. They echoed one of the origins of my work. My sensibility is synesthetic, it always associates seeing and hearing. Look and listen. These objects had all been chosen because they evoked a sound. Some brought to mind instruments. I have a very precise memory of my first synesthetic experience, when I was a child. I took a tuning fork, they explained how to make it vibrate and I put it on various objects, and I saw the resonance produced by the tone, which varied tremendously depending on whether the object was in glass or in wood. The idea that the same note, the one that we tune by, could produce different resonances, is not unrelated to Christian Bonnefoi’s words when he says that, “Painting’s horizon is its origin.” It’s this fact of starting something that gives you an energy that can extend over a long period, and that you maintain each day by drawing. The idea may start out packed with emotion, but for it to develop into an artwork, it has to bear fruit. For Chambre d’écho, I looked for a way of compressing an extensive experience in a single device. Events far back in time that are seminal for us make the present experience of working a bit like echoes in the mountain. I also wanted this device to be a bit like a watch mechanism.
It brings to mind a camera lucida, that is, the space where the subject to be painted is reflected and precipitated. Among all the works that go before us, the ones that fascinate me the most are the ones involving visual apparatus: Las Meniñas, Melancholia by Dürer, certain works by Vermeer and Poussin, which, as we known, construct visual devices, and then, of course the Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp and also the
INTERTWINING NARRATIVES Could we look at some of the elements of Chambre d’écho in detail, as we do in front of the Large Glass? Starting with
the chamber within the chamber. The idea for Chambre d’écho came to me at the lace museum in Calais. There are those extraordinary machines and, in the middle, sheets that form a kind of fog of stretched silk threads. It struck me as being like the materialization of a zone of silence. The small construction that you mentioned, which I call the “Cabin,” houses the “Sound Chandelier.” The “Cabin” and the “Chandelier” are mechanically linked by the fact that elements, like the hammers in old clocks, hit the chimes. Opposite, there is the “Curtain of Patience”—this is the term used in the theatre—, that is, the backdrop used to hide the set elements about to be used. In the “Echo Chamber” there is thus a painting, the “Curtain of Patience” which hides the stage machinery. This work took so long to make because it is the concretion of different, intertwining narratives. Among the machinery of the latest version are some words by Char, an excerpt from Fureur
et Mystère, set in motion by a random system: “Only the eyes are still capable of uttering a cry.” It’s true that at moments of dread, the gaze does cry out. I should say that there is a tragic event linked to this phrase. A student I knew at art school died in the attack at the Bataclan. A remembrance book was put out at the school and when I had to write something, those were the words that came to me. René Char wrote them when he was in a very particular si
tuation: the killing, during the Resistance, of the poet Roger Bernard, right in front of his eyes. Char could have done something but if he had the while village would have been razed. The violence of that situation is contained in those words.
La Chambre d’écho is a condensate of so many elements that one could talk about it as a kind of magnum opus, comparable in that respect to Duchamp’s Large Glass. Speaking of which, didn’t the students in your atelier at the Beaux-Arts make a copy of the Large Glass for use in a film?
A magnum opus is an event, but it’s also an ad- vent: something will result from it. Historically, what marked the century was the readymade, which is very important gesture, but which completely masked that extraordinary and complex masterpiece that is The Bride Stripped Bare, which Duchamp had the genius to call a “delay in glass.” The work that we think of as his last painting is for us a new way of conceiving and thinking about painting by other means. When I was still a student, in 1966, I discovered this work. I didn’t understand a thing about it, but I knew at once that it was extraordinarily important. Duchamp said that when he was making it drew on the unconscious, on intuition and on chance. No one had ever formulated an artistic program in this way, and indeed, Breton said of him that he was the first artist philosopher.
The first time I saw one of your apparatuses, it was in the basement at the Baudoin Lebon gallery in 2009. It was like being in a crypt, contemplating a treasure from a certain distance. Your apparatuses, like Duchamp’s, don’t allow the viewer to
enter them. What most concerns me is the trace the work will leave in the viewer’s memory. These realizations are an extension of the drawing. I am primarily a draftsman, and in a text he wrote about my work Jean-Christophe Bailly spoke of “expanded drawing,” with reference to Novalis’s idea of expanded poetry. My work drew on numerous references in the 1970s, for example, minimal art, wall drawings, the notion of the site-specific. One exhibition that greatly interested me was Light & Space by JamesTurrell at the Whitney Museum in 1981. Working on phenomena, things that exist only in the time of vision. My work is rooted in the Renaissance but also in modern creations that continue the speculations of the Renaissance. This brings us to Robert Fludd,(1) that Renaissance scientist you were interested in and who tried to find a cosmogonic explanation of the world in its totality. In Chambre d’écho you bring it all together:
light, sound, space, memory. You too have
the desire to articulate everything. That’s possible. Robert Fludd came before the Encyclopedists; he foreshadows the appearance of a new world of knowledge and, at the same time, he kept the connection with the old magical world through alchemy and cabalistic thought. But I absolutely have no interest in esotericism. But, just as Dalí represented a piece of bread on the edge of a table, a hallucinatory painting which shows the mystery of appearance, I think that ordinary objects sometimes contain such strangeness that we prefer to ignore them because, otherwise, we’d never have done with them. Some works remain enigmatic, even after a life spent contemplating them, like Dürer’s Melancholia. They are complete and at the same time retain a magnetic power which asks questions.
DUCHAMP AND OP ART Did kinetic art have an impact on you?
When I was a student at the Beaux-Arts, I frequented four galleries: Iolas, Givaudan, Sonnabend and Denise René. Kinetic art was associated with the fashion of the day. The atmosphere at the Galerie Denise René was really erotic: fashion photos were taken featuring works in the gallery. There were also dresses by Paco Rabanne which were like dressing girls’ bodies with sculptures. But the big exhibition for me was the one about the Bauhaus at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1969. It featured the Modulator by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and that work was hugely important to me.
« Clinamen n° 19 ». 2016. Acrylique sur écran polyester et toile. 52,5 x 41 x 2,5 cm. (Court. galerie Jean Fournier, Paris ; Ph. Alberto Ricci). Acrylic on polyester and canvas
You refer a lot to Duchamp and MoholyNagy, and yet the works for which you became known are closer to photorealism, especially since you represented shop
windows, like Richard Estes. It’s an interesting question. Pierre Restany spoke often about readymades, but he saw them as being extended by the adventure of objects, by Camille Bryen.(2) I understood that there was a link between all those things. At that point I met someone who was tremendously important. This was Jean Hélion. He said that there wasn’t such a big difference between Duchamp’s idea of art and his own, that the only difference was that he believed it was still possible to do something with painting.
Hélion also painted shop windows, that is, explicit metaphors of painting’s specular functions. People use to oppose those who worked with images and artists of ideas. In fact there is always a conceptual dimension in a work of art. The fact of meeting artists much older than me, and of having seen how they lived as artists, created a context that made me aware, after ten years, that in spite of the success I was having with my painting, the real work hadn’t started yet. The work really got started after I went through a crisis. This happened at a very specific moment, my trip to India, where I discovered the astronomical gardens of Jaipur and Delhi. These visits had big repercussions. I understood how space and time were intimately linked. Before that, I thought painting was ust a spatial art. But space is linked to time. Physicists say so. From that moment, I have not made objects or works but experience. I liked the idea that the studio should become a laboratory.
Works in Indian ink from the late 1970s, Chambres noires, literally represent laboratory tables with instruments laid out on
them. I used the term “thought instrument” for instruments that I make by deforming objects, sometimes very simple ones. I observe and sketch the cast shadows. This record produces a drawing which may result in a new volume, a new volume that I can once again put in the light, and observe its shadows, etc. Over the years, the object loses its reality and becomes anamorphic.
The “machinery” of Chambre d’écho is the
result of this process. I also describe these objects as “amnesic.” Sometimes, when you see an object, you think, “That reminds me of something,” but its function remains a mystery. It’s a secular mystery. Or a physical one.
You often inscribe words in your works.The first time a word was used it was in a pain
ting from 1974 which was reproduced in
artpress. This word was “iceberg.”(3) That word was the manifesto of my relation to realism. You see something, but what you perceive is only a tenth of the thing. The word “iceberg,” when combined with the reflections in a vitrine, is the clue that enables the gaze to seek by a process of accommodation, going from one plane to another, with the result that you don’t know what is in or beyond the transparency. It’s an effect that is used often in Op Art.
At Galerie Catherine Putman you are showing new series of drawings. Clinamen,
Lumière fossile, Cadastre. This is a much more spontaneous aspect of my work. I would never have imagined that one day I might be able to draw like that. I got to this freedom by observing the way the drawings in Mémoire du vent are made.(4) For Cadas
tre and for the À la poursuite des nuages series, I sat at my window and my drawings transcribed the movement of the gaze over the landscape or the movements of clouds. I record, but I have no idea what will happen, not even a second before I love the seismograph system.
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Do you watch your hand? Now and again. But I know exactly what space the drawing is going to be inscribed in. If there is an element of relaxation, it’s still guided by what is watched. I know that the eye is constantly moving. But when image appears to us, that is because the brain has fixed on an image. The eye moves around, line unfolds and then, where there is a point it becomes a center, that’s because there is a tree, or a house… It’s probably about recapturing a dazzlement. The root of my drawings in the Clinamen series is my interest in astrophysics and an eight-day stay at the Haute-Provence Observatory. I realized that throughout art history the stars have been represented symbolically, and that not many paintings showed the heavenly vault as it really is. I have just discovered a text by Malevich from 1920 which is fascinating because it establishes a relation between the skull and the cosmos.
Astrophysics brings us back to the time
space relation. People talk about fossil light The further you see, the further back in time you are seeing. We can see the light from a great number of stars that died a very long time ago. The oldest stars date from over thirteen billion years ago. A long time after their extinction, the brilliance of their disappearance reaches us across these gigantic distances. On 24 January 2014, we observed the explosion of the supernova SN 2014 J which liberated in only a few seconds the energy-equivalent of ten billion suns! Why am I interested in all that? Because of a notion that is shared by the arts and sciences, one formulated by Einstein as a “thought experiment.” If you think about this phenomenon, you enter into a relation with the real that exists only in thought. I heard the news on the radio one morning. And then I went out into the street and I looked at the people. Nothing in the way they lived changed and yet, if you think about it, it turns so many things on their head. Fossil light goes back to childhood experiences. When I went out walking around my parents’ house in the Jura I used to find Pentacrinites, star-shaped fossils that were two hundred million years old (which is nothing compared to thirteen billion). I left them where they were and I drew maps of imaginary skies by stretching string between them because they looked like constellations. The idea was that the sun was also on the ground. There is link with the cadaster, because in cadaster there is astre: star. I wanted to make a very big work with them, but I’d need ten thousand, and in the end these things are quite rare. It takes a good three hours to find a hundred of them.
Translation, C. Penwarden
(1) See Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd, Hermetic philosopher and surveyor of two worlds, Shambhala, 1979. (2) Pierre Restany spoke of Dada as possibly “sanctioning” lyrical abstraction, notably by Wols and Bryen. We might also recall Bryen and Ubac’s experiments with “objects left in the most unexpected places.” (3) Cf. artpress 421, April 2015. (4) For his Mémoire du vent series, the artist attached a glass needle fixed to a plant blown by the wind, causing it to engrave a surface coated with lampblack.
Bernard Moninot Né en / born 1949 à / in Le Fay Expositions personnelles / Solo shows: 1974 Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Étienne 1977 Documenta VI, Cassel 1979 Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence 1980 Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris 1997 Galerie nationale du Jeu de paume, Paris 1998 Fruit Market Gallery, Edimbourg 2001 National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay and Delhi 2010 MACVAL, Vitry-sur-Seine 2013 Musée Jean Cocteau, Menton 2014 Cabinet des dessins Jean Bonna, École des beaux-arts, Paris 2017 Art Genève Galerie Andata Ritorno 2018 Chambre d’écho, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (15 mars - 4 mai) ; Cadastre, Galerie Catherine Putman, Paris (17 mars - 4 mai) Drawing Now, salon du dessin contemporain, galerie Catherine Putman, Paris (22 - 25 mars) ; Galerie Art Espace 83, La Rochelle (21 septembre - 10 novembre)