GUILLAUME SEFF
Reflections of the Untold
Guillaume Seff was born in Toulouse, France, in 1977, and now works between Toulouse and Montreal, Quebec. He has been painting since his childhood. “At the age of 5,” he explains, “I loved to spend time painting, at school and at home. I enjoyed seeing paintings in museums; it was not a chore to accompany my parents.”
He says, “I paint what language does not allow me to say….Painting is time. And mine is like a trace where life is left. It contains the feeling and emotional charge of what remains.” Referring to the performances of pianist Keith Jarrett, he says, “For my part, I hope to have an emotion rather than an understanding why he wrote and/or played three black treble or two sixteenth notes to such a moment, even if it may be of interest but not essential, primordial. My emotion, which I felt, cannot be reduced, for example, to an explanation of the vibratory field produced by the passage of a major chord in minor; this is not what we will retain in the end. Rather that one of his pieces has moved you.”
Seff’s most recent paintings in mixed media and collage, Reflections of the Untold, will be shown at Nüart Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 6 through 22.
His abstract marks and glyphs appearing in heavy impasto recall the paintings of Antoni Tàpies (1923
2012), the Spanish painter and art theorist who wrote, “The artist has to make the viewer understand that his world is too narrow, he has to open up to new perspectives.”
Seff captures in the rich complexity of the surfaces of his paintings an even richer complexity of bits of his life and thoughts. The beauty of the complexity compels the viewer to look more closely and more deeply into the “new perspectives” proposed by Tàpies.
In S’aimer en septembre when you look at the collaged fragments of cloth and threads, the underlying ovals and other forms disappear, creating an illusion of depth that can be seen only bit by bit and slowly woven into a complex whole in your mind.