Remed, The Game Can Go On
Recently, Guillaume Alby, alias Remed, settled in a small Spanish village in Cantabria, facing the sea. In this remote place, the painter’s eye embraces the blue horizon, perhaps in the same way that his large sculpture Copula, installed on the beach, inhaled the immensity of the ocean into the curvature of its lines during the 2018 edition of the Anglet Biennale. Since the artist’s debut in 1999, his language of line, colour and curve has never ceased to evolve, through his large mural frescoes, which have made him internationally known as a street artist, but also in his paintings, made of areas of flat colour, which invariably evoke geometry, composition and symmetry. A quest for the simplified, minimal motif, to rediscover the aesthetics of the Ancients, that of Egyptian and Berber works that have touched him since childhood. For behind the structure, the grid of the drawing, art, according to him, is above all “the original, subconscious instinct of harmony”.
INFINITE HORIZON
Your paintings evoke Matisse’s paper cutouts, Malevich’s and Delaunay’s colour schemes, and Cocteau’s lines too. However, when you started painting, you explained that you hadn’t been initiated into the history of art at all, and knew only Picasso. So would you say that this artistic filiation we perceive today was somewhat unconscious at the beginning? My artistic culture’s indeed academically rather poor. I like to keep only the memory of a seen work rather than buying a book to see it again. For example, I recently discovered Malevich, and he touches me in the same way as Modigliani did 25 years ago. Then as now, I consider these artists as my forefathers in painting. Léger, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Klimt, Miró, all were fascinated by the power of the art of far-away cultures.Their path, which for me seems to go towards the past rather than the future, was a bridge to the essence, to a universal dimension of art. And it’s indeed in a semi-conscious way that I think I’ve taken the path they took, towards the source, thirstily.
All, I believe, understood that a work’s closer to a truth or to the perceived present when it’s simple, at least in appearance. What interests me isn’t imposing a state, but trying to propose as many perspectives of contemplation as possible. I quickly realised that saying too much or representing too much was tantamount to moving away from the spark that a work of art emanates. This is, I believe, the most important event, beyond words or description. I cultivate the “simple” to say and show without limiting the potential of perception or interpretation of a work. In this simplicity lies wonder.
Discovering Morocco was a shock. On a personal level, it was a revelation. The discovery of another reality, where the horizon’s present and infinite. Where time’s man’s friend. A reconnection with the earth and the sky. With the other too. I understood that the human body is a bridge. And on an artistic level, the feeling of a certain idea of beauty through the discovery of an art the geometry of which resonated with the structure of the world. All of a sudden, in Moroccan art, circles were disguised as squares, curves as lines, volumes hid themselves in flat surfaces. The full in the empty, light in colour... like the recollection of a universal, timeless language.
There’s been graffiti, muralism and travelling. But today you devote yourself more to painting on canvas and to sculpture, and your works are more minimal, close to abstraction. How does the curve, after the line, fit into this evolution? I think my work’s tended towards abstraction from the beginning: a relative abstraction, because the basis remains the graphic representation of a body in movement that geometry freezes. It’s the viewer’s imagination that gives it back the movement. I therefore first developed a rigid, mechanical understanding of bodies: in the form of a grid, of straight lines.The curve seemed to me only possible with a visible or invisible rectangular guide, beneath/within/around the curve. Then, to produce a work made only of curves became an objective. For the pleasure of the gesture.The movement! Almost pure, almost real. Beautiful as water.
My most recent work, Sensuality, is the result of cultivating this love of gesture. There are only two colours, the background, Ocean Blue, and the form, skin colour. A basic contrast that brings the notion of volume into the feeling of foreground and background. The volume of the bodies, like their movement, is caused by the tension of the line, rather than by the multiple colour contrasts that’s typical of most of my work.
ABSTRACT CONSCIOUSNESS
You paint in patches of flat colour. What’s their role? You also use the term “attitudes” to talk about your paintings. What does this mean? The attitude is the prolonged intention. Intention is the primary vibration. I look for the vibration of bodies. Each part of the painting is a body, or a form, which vibrates alone, as a whole, limited, identified by its visible borders. I give it a colour.The patch of colour becomes its identity. Hot or cold, near or far, dull or bright. Light and shadow, and the bodies come to life, and are seen.
Each body of colour vibrates beyond the visible limits of its contour. In the eye, its light spreads beyond its perimeter, and meets other colours, other “tones” with which it agrees or opposes. The segments interact with one another, pass in front of one another, and vibrate from their confrontation. This composes a larger whole, the work, which vibrates in a larger context, that of the encounter between the work and the viewer.
You said to me: “Man has always had an abstract, geometric consciousness, before he was a realist”. Is it to recover this consciousness that you geometrise your compositions? Since the beginning I’ve “played at geometry”. Children do it. The wise also probably do it. It gives an intoxicating sensation of traversing the ages, of bringing places together. I think it’s natural for human beings. Witnessing the work of our distant ancestors, their total yet intuitive mastery of geometry, creative simplification, and the resulting beauty has always fascinated me, affected me, seduced me, and of course inspired me.
Why did you entitle your latest exhibition, at the Delimbo Gallery in Seville in 2020, Conversation with the Void: Observation of Magic? Talking with the void means knowing how to listen, turning the white wall into a window.The void, or the illusion of the void, seems to me to be the source of our reality. I understand it as the womb of possibilities. The artist, as a machine that changes “potentials” into events ready to be “lived”, builds a work from the void... And to observe magic is to know how to see, to make something invisible/abstract become visible/real. In the end, with this title I’m talking about the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. I believe that everything that exists, or is perceived, belongs to the realm of the abstract before it’s tangible. In my opinion, any body/object that the artist makes existed before, in the wave field of his or her thoughts, dreams, or intentions.
Remed means “remedy”. More than an aesthetic pleasure of the eye, you seek to do good, to heal the soul through your works. The notions of harmony and vibration are therefore very important to you.This is what touched you in the works of Modigliani, I think. Do you think you’ve reached the harmony you’re looking for, or is the quest infinite? Modigliani’s work sent shivers down my spine. He was the first painter whose work resonated with me. He made me want to paint. Nowadays I like to refer to the principle of “syntony” to explain the play of vibrations between the artist and his work and between the viewer and the work. When we talk about vibrations, we’re talking about feeling, perception, exchange, communication, and even movement. In a way it’s like music. The painter’s lines play vibrations, like the poet’s words, like the dancer’s body. A work’s like a song for me. And I love all the songs I’ve composed. Any work made is ephemeral as soon as it’s finished, but my desire and wonder to create and contemplate drives me every day. So the game can go on.
Julie Chaizemartin is a journalist and art critic. She runs the cultural web radio Art District Radio dedicated to the arts and jazz music, and is the author of the book Ferrare, Joyau de la Renaissance Italienne (Berg International, 2012).
Remed
Né / born Guillaume Alby en / in 1978 à / in Paris
Vit et travaille à / lives and works in Suances, Espagne Expositions personnelles récentes / Recent solo shows: 2020 Delimbo Gallery, Séville
2019 David Bloch Gallery, Marrakech
2018 Delimbo Gallery, Séville
2017 David Bloch Gallery, Marrakech
2015 David Bloch Gallery, Marrakech