Denis Laget. Time Retained
For some thirty years Denis Laget has painted still lifes – lemons, skulls, herrings, quarters of meat, sheep heads – portraits, landscapes, flowers, birds ... seemingly “classic” subjects in art history. Romain Mathieu, who attended the opening of his exhibition at the Frac Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, last June, however, reveals an ambiguity, a disorder, between horror and beauty, a desire to seize a world that is fleeing. This exhibition is currently presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, until 9 February 2020, before being moved to the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémyde-Provence, From 14 March to 7 June 2020.
Why, in artpress, write an article about an artist who paints little pictures of flowers? This may perhaps surprise anyone who hasn’t yet realised that painting has come back to the forefront, that it occupies most of the walls of galleries today and is more generally accompanied by an affirmation of the materiality of work. And in this new attention, it isn’t absurd to think that the most interesting approaches are those that fall outside categories, notably those of abstraction and figuration, and explore ambiguous or rejected fields of modernity or the contemporary. Denis Laget’s painting has been developing since the 1980s in these spaces, and it is surely for this reason that it has attracted renewed interest, especially from young artists. It was boiling hot in ClermontFerrand on the day of the opening. In French one would say une chaleur de plomb (a leaden heat). This expression, which brings to mind a toxic metal, associated with a disease called lead poisoning, wasn’t imposed by chance. Lead, named by the alchemists Saturn, god of time for the Romans, is indeed not without affinities with Laget’s painting. People who shared a knowledge of this work, an intimate relationship maintained for a long time, sometimes gathered from afar inside the Frac Auvergne. While Laget’s work indeed enjoys a certain recognition, as evidenced by this series of exhibitions, it is nevertheless relatively at a distance from the most visible flows of contemporary art.These two remarks thus reveal two essential features of this work. First of all, in the ambiguity of
this painting where the appearance of forms is never far from their engulfment and where the brightness of colors is associated with a process of corruption, it is a question of time. On the other hand, it is accompanied by the sense of distance that is neither fusion nor flight, but the right gap, the right placement, that essential quality of combat sports. One mustn’t be deceived: if painting is silent, the approach to painting is a bias defended with tenacity and impertinence.
SKULLS, SHEEP, LEMONS
Laget paints landscapes, portraits, skulls, sheep’s heads, lemons ... his last series take as subjects flowers, birds, fig leaves successively. One could see in this list only a banality of subjects inscribed in the history of art, taken up, rehashed by the artist. This is where we find this gap, this step aside into subjects that seem to have no immediate hold on the contemporary or, rather, that don’t deliver in a didactic way their immediate meaning. As Karim Ghaddab notes in the catalogue, “behind the relative harmlessness of the subjects painted by Laget [...] hides something more unsettling” that makes these objects appear incongruous. Let us, therefore, reverse the proposition: if these subjects are trivial, it is because it is a question of what painting can still show us about a certain reality we cannot just relate to in obvious or transparent ways. These different motifs appear in a thick material, by accumulation of layers and colours. Each painting was first used as a palette for the realization of the previous painting.There follows from this the artist’s predilection for small formats, those that can be held in the hand.This relation to scale shows how much painting, for Laget, takes place in the hands, in this first relationship with a material that is loaded horizontally before moving into frontality. Each painting begins with recycled material, a formless material of colours. The motif thus merges with the brush strokes, between appearance and disappearance. The different techniques summoned by the artist – imprints, stencils, streaks made by a ruler – don’t fix the shape, but disturb the material, to hinder the drawing, as projections and scrapings. The concretion of the figure in this movement of matter determines, moreover, the evolution of the different series as much as their subject. In Skulls and
Lemons – older – a ring delimits the figure and extracts it from the mass of bright colors. The flowers, in the last series, are inseparable from the patches of colour that give birth to them. Moreover, the artist has painted them without a model and if the eye recognizes them, it can’t identify them, that is to say, name them. The most recent series,
Fig Leaves, has a repetition of these shapes that approximates a pattern effect and amplifies the saturation of the painting. Facing the works, the eye circulates in the thickness of the surface, is lost before grasping a shape again, lingers, goes astray again, feels both attracted by the seduction of colours and repulsed by their accumulation. This is how we come to realise that this painting retains time, though not just through texture: this duration has something to do with the image that emerges from this submersion.
OVERFLOW AND MOURNING
Laget confides that he tends in each painting to use all colours, only varying materials and gestures. We understand that this isn’t a balance, but an overflow that spreads over the zinc frame of Lemons and then onto the edge. The painting is the location of a density, not only of matter and colours but also of the sensations and emotions they carry, of a memory which is also that of painting, of its history. To leave nothing, to abandon or forget nothing, but to make the painting a receptacle, the place of a survival, where
the painting pours into a whole and is particularised in a form. As we know full well, Laget is painting after the many deaths of painting, which has been able to survive itself in the form of a mourning (1). However, this mourning doesn’t take on a rarefied appearance, but that of an intensity, an excess contained in the modesty of its formats. Perhaps this is the reason why John Millais's
Ophelia is so appealing to him, because whoever has seen this painting knows that Ophelia’s permanently sleeping body is surrounded by the luxuriance of nature with which it merges to survive its own death. If this painting is traversed by death through the vanities the skulls represent, but also by the corruption of the flesh implied by the heads of sheep, fish, meat, it is equally traversed by life. The brightness of colours animates the skulls, the rottenness of the flesh is an organic life that is transferred into the stirring of painting. In French “still life” is referred to as “dead nature”. These paintings are both. In this movement of matter, shapes and colours, it is a question of remaining in the transition from one to the other of these states, in a space between two called the ephemeral. For painting, capturing this transience may seem like a matter of flowers but, through them, it is also the attempt to seize a fugitive world, always already lost, and the will to “not allow the effacement to take away the reasons for living (2)”. This capturing is also reflected in the amateur photos the artist takes with his mobile phone, and which are presented in the exhibition. These photos aren’t the recording of the real, they don’t fall under a descriptive gaze, but, by their overexposure, their point of view and their framing, they present a reality not observed but seen. In these paintings the concretion of forms is the construction of this vision exhumed from the flow of matter. A series of landscapes entitled Disasters, produced between 2007 and 2010, reveals another way of operating this capturing. Laget explains that this is a collage of images of an idyllic seaside, factory buildings and the concentration camp universe.This second image is associated with a text by Georges Bataille on the terror triggered in him by factory chimneys as a child; this story was mingled with a personal memory of visiting the factory where his father worked.
HORROR AND BEAUTY
These landscapes are a superposition of memories and references, a mixture of beauty and horror, painted on cardboard. The artist uses a liquid paint that spreads and mixes with charcoal. The surface is darkened with blackish streaks, which are equated with both smoke and a degradation of the image, corrosion of paint itself. In the passage to which the artist refers, Georges Bataille then defines the goal assigned to his dictionary in the magazine Documents by comparing it to the little child who “sees the image concretely” of these chimneys. This regression towards the concrete birth of the image also seems to be what animates Laget’s paintings, the movement of his material itself, and this birth cannot be naive or pure, but on the contrary troubled and worried. In fact, we could list the pairs of opposites relative to this work: form / formless, figure/ disfigure, seduction / repulsion. Beauty plunges us into its reverse and this painting is fundamentally impure. We cannot help but see in this impurity an eminently contemporary position of resistance to a world that never ceases to claim a total transparency and unequivocal grasping of things, a distance for which it is better, indeed, to have some qualities of the fencer or boxer.
(1)Yve-Alain Bois, Painting:TheTask of Mourning, in Painting as Model, Boston, The MIT Press, 1991; in French:
La Peinture Comme Modèle, Les Presses du réel, 2017.
(2) Jean-Christophe Bailly, Saisir, Quatre Aventures
galloises, Seuil, 2019.
Denis Laget Né en / born 1958 1980 Après le classicisme, musée de Saint-Étienne 1982 In situ, Centre Georges-Pompidou 1986 Musée de Saint-Étienne ; Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables d’Olonne 1987 Première exposition à la galerie Marie-Hélène Montenay où il expose jusqu’en 2000 1988 Participation à la Biennale de Venise 1989 Pensionnaire à la Villa Médicis 1996 Musée de Budapest 2002 Frac Auvergne 2014 et 2016 Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris 2019-2020 Frac Auvergne (29 juin - 29 septembre) Musée des beaux-arts, Rennes (26 octobre 2019 - 9 février 2020) 2020 Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (14 mars - 7 juin 2020)