TO THE ROOTS OF ELASTOGENESIS

Let’s start with memories.The first is Richard Texier’s, which he has recounted often and revisited in the Manifeste de l’élastogenèse (see pp. I-XXIV of this issue). As a child in the Poitevin countryside, he was returning one evening on a boat carrying cans of milk when the milk accidentally spilled into the black water of the marsh. The pure matter, the first food of the newly born, sank gently into the quagmire, and he marvelled at it. Another memory, one that belongs to me, is admittedly less seminal, but nevertheless sheds light on my view of the work. It was my first visit to the studio, not for a “studio visit” but for a small party that was being held there. I lingered in front of some paintings, which seemed to be old, that were placed simply against the wall near the entrance. They featured enigmatic diagrams and grids that the artist tried to explain to me. I understood, without really understanding, that these compositions were governed by a lunar calendar. My takeaway was that space—in the sense of the cosmos— structures the time that structures the space of these paintings.

Later, when I got to know the man and his work a little better, I discovered that although he had been drawn to painting by contemplating a reproduction of an Yves Tanguy painting in a schoolbook— Jour de lenteur (1937), to be precise—, Texier ended up studying architecture. Yet the surrealist painter’s vaporous expanses do not encourage us to imagine building anything in them; it is enough to release strangely rolled pebbles and protozoa. Another contradiction that we will have to try and resolve, or not. By the time Texier graduated as an architect, he had started painting on a regular basis. The Calendriers lunaires were followed by surfaces overloaded with signs. As a fairly solitary artist, he nevertheless made friends with Jean Degottex, the painter of signs and Métasignes. Degottex was also a model of purity. He would follow his example, but not straight away. RichardTexier was born in 1955. He happens to be one of the most sociable men alive, whose curiosity leads him to meet people working in all fields, especially science, as this issue’s table of contents shows, but he conducts his own research in a relatively independent way. He is younger than the Minimalist and the Support-Surface generations, whose formal radicalism he did not seek to maintain or parody in the manner of the neo-geos. He did not share his contemporaries’ taste for popular culture, nor those of Figuration Libre (Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa), nor those of the New York scene of the 1980s (Julian Schnabel, JeanMichel Basquiat, Keith Haring), with whom he spent some time in New York. In truth, as he would later declare, Texier felt “very surrealist.” “For me,” he added, “this is the point of origin and the great movement that remains unmatched.” (1)

THE POINT OF ORIGIN

Since the upheavals engendered by the historical avant-gardes, generations of artists have found themselves faced with choices that consist either in following in the footsteps of a new tradition—for example, recovering the legacy of Duchamp and the readymade or developing the lessons of Mondrian—or starting from scratch, in the manner of those who set out to be pioneers. Of course, starting from scratch is largely an illusion, but it is a productive one. It is a state of mind, an attitude, perhaps even a bias that paradoxically commands a highly recognisable aesthetic: an unstructured, undifferentiated, open pictorial space, and within that space, forms that are themselves indeterminate, neither frankly identifiable nor totally abstract—one might say embryonic. Promises of new life in a limitless expanse. This aesthetic was the “point of origin” for those who found themselves arriving in a field of ruins, the Surrealists who had seen the Great War, experienced it in some cases, sometimes participated in Dada, and who felt that something had to be invented after nihilism. It wasTanguy’s, Arp’s, Miró’s, and to a certain extent Matta’s. It was also that of Dalí, in whom Texier took an interest, to the point of writing a novel inspired by his Grand Masturbateur, (2) for while Dalí was quick to shape his amoebic fauna in such a way as to produce almost human monsters, the principle of double images that he subsequently introduced begot forms that were inevitably ambivalent and unstable.

In 1940, it was the American artists who found themselves forced to return to this point of origin, barely recovered from the Great Depression and brutally isolated, cut off from Europe by the Second World War. No one put it better than Barnett Newman: “In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope—to find that painting did not really exist. Or, to coin a modern phrase [...], that painting was dead. The awakening had the exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration [...] to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before.” (3) Many of the painters of the New York School, starting with Newman, but also Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem De Kooning, William Baziotes and Arshile Gorky, went through a biomorphic period before developing their own singular style.

In the 1980s, when Richard Texier presented his first exhibitions, the part of the world we live in was certainly not experiencing the disaster of war—on the contrary, the end of the Cold War was shaking things up—but it was witnessing a catastrophe of a different kind, the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl (1986), which ushered civilisation into a new era. In the artistic field, the same decade saw the institutionalisation of the avant-garde, post-modernism and the neo- and transavant-gardes. Was it this context of scientific catastrophe and cultural disenchantment that led a thirty-year-old painter not only to seek out this “point of origin,” but to somehow hold on to it, to prolong the vibrant moment of an emergence, of a birth, right up to the present day? Over the next decade, the surfaces covered with intersecting and superimposed systems of signs—alphabets, numbers, graphic and cabalistic symbols, and sometimes the reproduction of a fabulous bestiary extracted from some codex— gradually became lighter, giving way to more synthetic elements, islands or planets resembling giant seeds, converging in archipelagos or galaxies or otherwise; the black shapes, cut to size, are reminiscent of