Edi Dubien: Unconditional Freedom

In 2020, the exhibition L’Homme aux mille natures at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon revealed the breadth of Edi Dubien’s universe of drawings, paintings and sculptures. Children’s faces were placed next to animals and plants, sometimes merging together. Regularly exhibited by the Alain Gutharc gallery in Paris, his work will be featured in Lacan, l’exposition (see the special feature in this issue) and will accompany Jacques Roubaud’s book, Les Animaux de tout le monde et les animaux de personne, which will be published in March by Gallimard.

Edi Dubien is a survivor. His productions are the symptoms, in the clinical sense, of his identity and of a path marked by exclusion. At birth, Edi was Dominique, with the biological signs of a femininity that he felt was an imposition contrary to his nature: that of being a man. This was without counting on the violence of a family entrenched in a patriarchal model for whom this masculine assertion necessarily constituted an unacceptable deviance. It was also without counting on his father, a renowned greengrocer in Paris, who imposed an authoritarian straitjacket on his wife and, above all, on the young child.The regularity of this brutality, full of abuse and contempt, was part of a desire to correct this member of the “weaker sex,” who was necessarily abnormal because of his behaviours and games that did not conform to the doxa of his gender.Yes, Edi is a survivor, so broken was he after his adolescence. The assiduous reading of poets—such as Rimbaud—and the conviction that he was an artist served as an escape route. Then came the getaway, the streets, the squats, odd jobs, a passion for jubilant, anti-establishment punk, androgynous outfits with leather jackets. And wanderings in the nighttime world, a place of gender confusion. Edi was only in his early twenties, but slowly settled into a semi-stable life by becoming involved in the second-hand network, a twentieth-century design trend. He proved to be a formidable dealer. His banter and love of contact were the only legacies of a family that was now hated. A van became his den, his home, his studio. His enduring passion for art led him to produce his first works as both a liberating gesture and an identity claim. He had to heal the rifts and finally embark on the long process that would lead him to assume the identity that befit him. His first attempted transition, in hospital, was a failure. He then began a life-saving psychoanalysis, which lasted 15 years, in which he learned to channel his struggles, and a difficult journey to have his status as a man recognised by the State. In 2014, his civil status was officially changed. Edi had the feeling of a second birth, reinforced shortly afterwards by the death of his hated father.

PORTRAITS IN THE MAKING

2020. The impressive exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon was a chance to discover his watercolour drawings, sculptures and paintings. His world features serious-looking young men, animals and toy figures of indeterminate sex. The Collargol bear rubs shoulders with made-up rabbit heads, portraits of children with empty eyes, teenagers confronted with chickadees, squirrels, deer, ferns and other plants. The brushstrokes are sharp, and the colours oscillate between ochres, reds and siennas, heightened by whites and sometimes blues, all taken directly from nature.The technical mastery is astonishing.

From then on, he was celebrated as the hero of gender issues. He became the man who dared to tackle the dark territories of abusive childhoods and scorned identities. He was somewhat hastily labelled as a queer and LGBTQIA+ activist. Some people saw him as a critic of the patriarchal order and its system of domination, as a hero of an ecology that combines the defence of animals with identity claims. Edi denied it, he didn’t exactly recognise himself in this portrait. What he transcribes is always a form of urgency, a channelling of energy. But in contrast to his early years as an artist, his work from 2014 onwards seems calmer. “When I think about my recent drawings, I make them with the same conviction as before, but they’re aimed at a lot more people,” he told us in his studio. “Now I can put a name to my issues. My personal universe expresses itself more. Before, the punches dominated. These drawings are a part of myself that I didn’t have time to show. Now I exist, whereas before I was trying to exist. My self-portraits from 1980-2000 were all portraits in the making.” Few people are really familiar with these creations from a time when he painted in his van and held unofficial exhibitions on the boulevards, unpacking his canvases on the pavement, rejected and with no access to art schools. “I worked more in the act. It was almost like a performance, even though the only thing that remained was the final result: a painting. I did some self-portraits, for example, where I cut my lines into wood with a chainsaw. In my paintings, there was a lot of raw, quite violent material.” Hundreds of works date from this period—the

Serial Identity series—composed of portraits on canvas or paper—“all transvestites”—featuring dozens of almost deformed faces juxtaposed on top of one another. Although he had no gallery and was scorned by the official art world, he nevertheless made a name for himself and attracted a number of international collectors. As he himself confesses, his practice was a matter of course, but also a means of resistance. And then there was the necessity: “I also had to make a living and pay for my therapy sessions!”

SYMBIOSIS

With the onset of a new transition and the intake of testosterone came a paradigm shift. The drawings became calmer, more detailed and more introspective. The make-up on the portraits of teenagers and animals became a clue, an autobiographical clue that re-enacts the tension between being and appearing, between distribution in the playground of sexuality and political impositions on the body, treated seriously but with humour. A form of blurring is also at play. Identity is part of a fluidity that each person is free to summon up as they please, in a circular movement ranging from the most outrageous artifice of postures to the staging of oneself. This is part of the unconditional freedom that drives him, and that goes beyond a critical discourse about gender. If the revelation of his identity required a journey made up of violence and resilience, if these dishevelled cowboys are indeed the self-portraits of an unhappy childhood, we must also see a form of redeeming liberation in the alliances between humans and nature that leads him to claim his place in the world. His drawings and paintings unfold fragments of his story whilst simultaneously transcending it. Children can cry, and see their tears become a river. Cinderella may contemplate a skull, a lion may wear shoes with heels, or a child may exchange a kind of plasma with a robin, all oscillating between two states.Their temporality seems uncertain, both that of the past and that of a liberating future in which otherness becomes the norm.

Hence also the importance of nature to him. Nature is a concept, an abstraction, “a way,” warned Philippe Descola, “of establishing a distance between the human and the nonhuman” and of founding the exploitation of the world. In his drawings and paintings, the recurrent use of animals, often treated as people, embodies this questioning of the hierarchy between species, suggesting the extent to which the situation long experienced by Edi assimilated him to these discriminated and rejected subgroups. But this fusion of the boundary between man and nature (animals, plants) is also evidence of a relationship with his direct environment: an isolated farm in the Vendôme countryside where he has lived for several years. And the strong relationship he has with his garden, and the animals that live in it or pass through it, is part of a twofold process: a retreat from the city, the crowds, the concentration of humans, where the marks of exclusion are felt more than anywhere else, but also the possibility of finding the roots of self-reconstruction in this fusional relationship with nature, linking the traumatised child and the man he is now.This makes it easier to understand some of the artifices of the work. One character sees his nascent beard become a plant, whilst others wear simple foliage as earrings, as if to better capture the whispers of the world. And what can be said about the works that imagine a symbiosis between the human and animal worlds, often visible in the form of fluids or essential energies passing from one figure to another?

Edi Dubien’s art functions as a machine for political transformation. He analyses his career less in terms of identity than of the production of subjectivity, more in terms of movement and fluidity than of representation and fixity. Hence why he is wary of the identity discourses of minorities, especially when they are conceived and structured by those minorities themselves. The way they operate becomes an “act of surveillance,” turning the mechanisms of social control to their advantage, as Michel Foucault had already foreseen in the 1980s. Edi Dubien rejects the risk of aestheticising the victim, all victims. “My works? They come from emotion, from reflection, from what I feel at the time. It’s also, and above all, a question of energy, of what I can give. And the pleasure of painting has a real place in it nowadays. It’s cries, words, mine and others. And lots of love. Now, I’m no longer afraid to do it, no longer afraid to start again every day. And if I have any doubts, all I have to do is look at Rembrandt, read Pasolini or listen to Brahms. That’s enough.”

Translation: Juliet Powys

Damien Sausset is a critic and curator.

De haut en bas from top: Sans titre. 2021. Sans titre. 2023. Crayon, aquarelle pencil, watercolour. 30 x 20 cm