The De-Definition of Abstraction
Pure colours, pure presence of form: throughout the 20th century, abstract painting was accompanied by a discourse on the reduction of painting to its means, a quest for the least, synonymous with a search for purity, with, as a counterpart, the repetition of the “last painting”. Painting thus survived on its own, at the risk of a form of exhaustion. Modern purity appeared as early as the exhibition 0.10 (1), where it was a question of reaching a point zero within each practice. Malevitch’s Black Square (1915) appeared there as the most radical expression.This purity was also expressed in Mondrian’s work. It could also be seen in Bauhaus design. Beyond these few examples of early abstract avant-gardes, modern purity found its most successful theoretical expression in the critical approach of Clement Greenberg. Despite the strength of its coherence, this vision could only partially mask the multiple deviations from this aspiration for purity in many approaches—and even within the works that seem most inclined to seek it. For several decades now, the history of art has been constantly re-reading this narrative in order to recover from these obliterations. Today, on the artists’ side, the difficulty or mistrust in claiming the term “abstraction” for works which, for the neophyte, nevertheless correspond to this field, can be directly linked to the abandonment of this quest for purity. The comments of Claire Colin-Collin (b. 1973) and Claire Chesnier (b. 1986) in this article bear witness to this. The fragmentation of shapes and of the notion of medium, the diversity of gestures have reversed the process of modernist reduction. At the same time, we are witnessing an assumed commitment to painting, in its materiality, in the sensitivity and even sensuality that it conveys. Claire Chesnier works exclusively with ink on large format paper. The surface is entirely covered by diluted inks, the repeated passage of which intermingles the colours in subtle variations.The eye glides over it without anything stopping it, while the body feels engulfed by the luminosity of these diaphanous veils. Claire Colin-Collin paints in successive layers. A form emerges as if by sedimentation, which the painting brings to the foreground. The light seems to emerge from a hidden depth. In this flat thickness, there is a question of appearance and disappearance, of burying and exhuming through the physical, organic and psychic layers of the paint.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE GAZE
There is nothing naive in these works: quite the contrary, but a relationship that is the opposite of postmodern distancing for a generation that has perceived the limits of discursivity and citation devices. The exhibition Milléniales at the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine showed this gap between approaches built up during the 1980s—such as Peter Halley (2), Blair Thurman (b. 1961), Francis Baudevin (b. 1964)—and younger artists—such as Gerald Petit (b. 1973) and Hugo SchüwerBoss (b. 1981). In Obsolescence déprogram
mée [Unplanned Obsolescence] at the Musée des Sables d’Olonne, the diversion through digital technology in the process of emergence of forms does not take us away from painting but, on the contrary, leads us back to it, whether this happens through failure or diversion, as in the case of Daniel Lefcourt (b. 1975), or through a confrontation of the means of painting with the digital image in the works of Rémy Hysbergue (b. 1967). It is not possible here to draw up a genealogy of this evolution, but a few names can be given as examples. The late recognition of Eugène Leroy (3) is quite emblematic of a transformation of the way we look at things. Optical and tactile, figurative and abstract, Leroy’s work, with its concretions, is fundamentally impure in terms of modernist purity. In 1983 Mary Heilmann produced a painting entitled Rosebud. The red dots repeated at regular intervals aren’t the primary forms of an abstract language, but resonate with her memories, indicated by the reference to Orson Welles. The artist associates these dots with the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, in order to express a personal pain. This work by the American artist is comparable to the work of Marie-Claude Bugeaud, whose vocabulary of dots and lines evokes a memory, a game of allusions from which a figurative motif sometimes emerges. Finally, Solo for
Spectrum (2001), the Albert Oehlen’s work chosen for Obsolescence déprogrammée, is a digital print that shows his process of hybridisation between mediums, and an accumulation of forms as a decorative cacophony.
Each of these works transgresses abstract purity in its own way. This impure painting today finds many echoes in artists who, after abstraction, operate in ambiguous or repressed fields of modernity. Some of the orientations that characterise this “impurity” can be noted, based on current exhibitions and a few other examples, among many approaches that are not limited to France.
PATTERN
The decorative, which is an obvious opponent of modernity (4), is thus reactivated in contemporary creation, whether it is summoned as a formal reference or as a contextualisation of the work.The work of Stéphane Calais (b. 1967) coordinates these two aspects with an expansion of painting within the exhibition space, often with the use of motifs made up of repeated stains and flowers that summon a history of ornament. The in-situ paintings of Flora Moscovici (b. 1985) proceed from a dialogue with the place that determines the painter’s gestures, but which is also transformed by a pictorial process nourished by various experiences, such as the memory of a Jewish cemetery in Romania for Milléniales. In a different way, it is the repetition of a motif within his paintings that links the painting of Simon Rayssac (b. 1983) to the decorative.This effect of pattern, in contrast with reduction, allows the artist to appropriate various shapes, gestures and coloured sensations.This decorative leaning, in the broadest sense, doesn’t mean the dissolution of the work or the simple enhancement of the place. It corresponds to a questioning of the autonomy of the abstract form, and links painting to an exteriority that nourishes, accompanies and solicits it. The most salient aspect of current approaches that can be associated with this term impurity lies in overcoming the opposition between abstraction and figuration.
Obsolescence déprogrammée shows the integration of the digital image in painting, not as a reproduction but by situating itself at the tipping point where it accesses existence. Jugnet + Clairet (b. 1958 and 1950), in the Switch series, paint the extinction of the television image or, in the Tapes series, its formation and deformation at the end of the video tape. This questioning of the image taken to its limit can be situated after abstraction. However, it also revives an origin of abstract practices, where the questioning of the visible was accompanied by a taste for images resulting from spiritualism or perceptions transformed by science. Working with the image to situate oneself in the inbetween of its appearance and its disappearance can also translate into a proximity of the pictorial process to that of photographic printing. Having produced a series of works based on Rorschach tests, manifesting this circulation between abstraction and figuration, Gilles Balmet (b. 1979) uses dipping tanks for ink paintings that evoke both a gestural dimension and the distanced rendering of photographic landscapes. In Milléniales one can also discover a work by Jacob Kassay (b. 1984), where the deposition of a silver film on the canvas, by immersing the support in a bath, is compared by the artist to the revelation of the photographic image. The result is an irregular surface, varying with the light and slightly reflective, capturing a spectral image of the viewer. In a different way, the works of Rémy Hysbergue confront us with a perceptual disorder: the belief in the photographic image is confronted with the sensations of painting. In a kind of reversal, the latter summons the abstraction specific to photography to reappropriate its specific effects of light, depth and texture.
METAMORPHOSES OF MATTER
It is from volume that the paintings of Maude Maris (b. 1980) restore a strangeness to the image. The artist makes casts of objects that she stages in the form of models, then photographs them and reproduces them in painting, in both a realistic and virtual way. These works present an astonishing, silent world. They are also a kind of scenography of painting itself, as a manifestation of its means and its own space, between figuration and abstraction, but also between reality and fiction. This is another remarkable aspect, shared by several contemporary approaches: the accumulation of colours and forms escapes from literality and summons the imagination. A play of visions on the edge of the image becomes “the medium for fairy-tale journeys” (5). The Odyssées by Armelle de SainteMarie (b. 1968) are elaborated without a pro
ject, by superimposing layers, gestures that respond to each other, but the meanders of the pictorial material do not fail to evoke a dreamlike landscape. The image is made, unravelled and tips over into strangeness. In the same way, the abundance of forms in the paintings of Christophe Robe (b. 1966) builds a landscape that is none other than that of painting. This reappropriation of the gestures of modernity in the form of heterogeneous fragments that clash, overlap and cohabit is transformed into a vision where, in the artist's words, “very deep things, archetypes, children’s stories and myths are summoned”. In the watercolours of Gabriel Chiari (b. 1978) the expansion of the colour in stains on the paper gives rise, in a random way and without drawing by hand, to a world that seems organic.The metamorphosis of shapeless matter merges with the living. Faced with these works, where identification is lacking, it is therefore a question of passage, of circulation between abstraction and figuration, but also between sensations, emotions, a free circulation between forms through which a complexity and a mysterious depth of our relationship to the world is formed. These approaches manifest different registers of impurities with regard to the modernist absolute. Nevertheless, it is not a question of trying to grasp them through a definition or a movement, but of bringing them closer together in a space with undefinable borders, in an in-between, a hollow within the categories they challenge. One could object that the notion of impurity is easily stretchable, to the point of being diluted in the variety of contemporary practices and thus losing all relevance. It can only be understood in relation to the very notion of purity. It is therefore the activation of a memory of modernity confronted with an extended memory of painting. In a way it is another way of understanding this duty of mourning that Yve-Alain Bois identified in a famous 1980s article (6): a mourning that has become jubilant and disrespectful, a bit carnivalesque. Thus, the assertion of painting that proceeds from these steps does not refer to an essence, but is entirely on the side of becoming, according to the old philosophical dichotomy between being and appearance. The truth of this painting can only be fragmentary, changing and circumscribed. The desire for truth is accompanied by the awareness of its impossibility, and the failure to grasp it other than in a transitory manner. It is difficult not to compare these approaches with the contemporary vacillation of different social and political landmarks, while new forms of purity of identity and a Manichaeism of individual relationships tend to assert themselves in order to grasp the full topicality of these pictorial “impurities”. Impure, these approaches present us with a transitory truth that is founded on a sensitive intelligence, summoning our perception outside of predefined models and reading grids.
(1) The exhibition 0.10 took place in St. Petersburg in 1915. Its title proclaims the grouping of ten artists— actually fourteen, including Malevich and Tatlin—who had reached the zero degree of their art, that is to say a destruction of old art and the beginning of a new.
(2) Peter Halley is the main American figure in the Neo-Geo movement, which emerged in the early 1980s. His work manifests a renewal of geometric abstraction, the forms of which he nevertheless associates with images of prisons and a sclerotic social system.
(3) The painting of Eugène Leroy (1910-2000) gradually gained recognition during the 1980s, thanks in particular to the interest shown in it by Georg Baselitz.
(4) This problematic relationship to the decorative arts has undergone numerous episodes in the course of modernity. Nevertheless, the Pattern and Decoration movement (see “Pattern, decoration and craft”, artpress no. 462, January 2019), born in the United States in the 1970s, was the one that affirmed, in the most direct way, an aspiration toward the renewal of painting by referring to the most diverse decorative practices.
(5) This expression is used by Jean Messagier in connection with his series of Gels [Freezings].
(6) Yve-Alain Bois, “The task of mourning”, Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, exhibi
tion catalogue, Boston, ICA, 1986. Romain Mathieu is an art critic and teacher at the École supérieure d’art et design of Saint-Étienne. He has been co-curator of Après l’école – Biennale artpress des jeunes artistes – Saint-Étienne 2020.