The Brooklyn Rail

Have been reading Elias Canetti, first Auto da Fé, a dizzyingly grotesque novel where money and violence are in every encounter. Looking at reports of the Iran war and the continual pillaging by the current US government it seems more than appropriate. One of the things I like about Canetti so far is that he is a thinker more than an artist, but still a beautiful writer. He abhorred aestheticism & it’s funny that I love French painting which has been accused of being “too aesthetic.” Contrarily I have long admired its evidence of interesting thinking as much as for its obvious elegance.

Calming to be here. Springlike weather then grey northern European winter drizzle. The painter Camila Oliveira Fairclough, a friend and an artist I have long admired, who is also an astute evaluator of contemporary painting, graciously lends me her studio & I am immediately working.¹ The following week I am in Brussels overnight making a video and a public dialogue at Almine Rech with Erik Lindman,² showing paintings selected from the past ten years paired with works by Motherwell. In preparation I read Mary Ann Caws book on him, “with Pen & Brush”. I learn a lot: here there are quotes from some of his writings:

“…an artist is someone who has abnormal sensitivity to a medium.”

“A picture is a collaboration between artist and canvas. ‘Bad’ painting is when an artist enforces his will without regard to the sensibilities of the canvas”

“it’s the format, not the subject, that determines a lot in the painting”

“Surrealism is above all a system for enchanting everyday life”

The best insight was Arthur Danto’s, commenting that Motherwell’s background studying 17th & 18th century philosophy brought him to art with “the necessity of setting painting at a distance and determining how it could be done.” Which is what Erik and I seem to have in common & what we talk about.

The exhibition, which includes two little Picasso paintings chosen by his grandson, Bernard Picasso, are as surface-oriented as the works by Erik & Robert. The idea for the exhibition originated because Erik was told by many friends & associates how his work reminded them of Motherwell more than that he was originally drawn to him. It is an interesting move, since Motherwell’s contribution is still under discussion, or more accurately not discussed much as of late. The only artist we could think of who immediately acknowledged his influence was James Bishop. That was long ago.

When I returned to Paris the following morning I needed to see Didier Demozay, “Tableaux 2000-2010” ³ at Galerie Bernard Jordan before it closed. A painter I have long liked, who visited me with his wife in Brooklyn about fifteen years ago. He died last year, having spent his entire career in the south of France. Shirley Jaffe didn’t understand why I liked the work so much. It was seemingly simple, large brushings of full-hued colors. Large blocks of paint on a white field. Broad strokes that he had mixed in the studio from pigments. Nervous, expressive strokes, but contained. Revisions present. Elegant, but rough, too.

Generally there is a level of consideration and courtesy on the street that surpasses New York & people seem happier. And visual richness is endless. Every day some moment occurs when traversing the city that registers as pure beauty.

One morning we went to the 12th arrondissement with Marielle Paul⁴ to see her temporary mural in the foyer of a low-income housing complex. Part of the budget of this City-of-Paris development funds a curator who makes choices of artists to decorate the lobbies for limited time periods. It was a simple image of a partially abstracted tree, a replica of the many gouache paintings that she will show at Galerie Maria Lund this coming autumn. Soon after we went to her studio, in a collection of 19th century buildings that have been artist’s studios for 200 years. Her space was once occupied by Eugène Carrière. As often happens when an artist finds themselves involved in a subject, the way that Marielle did when she started making semi-abstract images of trees, she discovered Paul Valery’s, Dialogue de l’arbre (1943). Next to it, on her desk was a copy of Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbier de Prison.

Emmanuel van der Meulen’s solo exhibition opens at Galerie Allen.⁵ I happen to have seen most of his shows for almost twenty years. He is un copain. Titled Praxis, it consists of around a dozen works on paper all about 20 x 20 centimeters, most seem to be variations on the square motifs of large square paintings he has made over the past ten years. Some geometric, others with a poured paint technique. In all cases, the past work and the present, the emphasis is on the crafting of an image at the intersection of the central or vanishing point in pictorial perspective, the focal point of the photograph, the possibilities of liquid paint and the aura of the icon. There is also the immanence of the image as well as perhaps of something sacral.

I am scheduled to write a review elsewhere of the current show at Galerie Frank Elbaz⁶ , RE:FORM; A Glimpse of abstraction in Vietnam since Doi Moi, that puts together 5 artists from Vietnam that are represented in Paris by Galerie Bao. Its owner Lê Thiên-Bảo⁷ curated this exhibition. One of the artists, Đỗ Hoàng Tường, I knew twenty years ago when I wrote a catalog essay of his work for Galerie Quynh⁸ in Ho Chi Minh City. Another, Trương Công Tùng, had an extensive installation at San Art⁹ in Ho Chi Minh City that I wrote about two years ago.¹⁰ Seeing art in Paris of French abstraction as well as that of Vietnamese returns me to the territory where much of my years as an active art journalist took place and helped me to form my point of view as an artist, all a result of reading Baudelaire & deciding that my job as an artist is to go where my curiosity takes me. It included writing, apparently.

Drawing Now, Paris¹¹, an annual contemporary art fair, was predominantly local, but there were galleries from Brussels, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portland, Oregon. Among a lot of not so interesting works on paper were the kinds of things I like to comb through these places to see, such as great drawings by Pierre Tal Coat and Jean-Pierre Schneider in Galerie Berthet-Aittouarés,¹² as well as a wall of works on paper by Marie-Claude Bugeaud,¹³ an artist I have long known & admired. Elsewhere were lovely muffled watercolor landscapes by Yayoi Castellas Gunji¹⁴ & some curious last works by Robert Wilson, watercolors and drawings from his Pessoa project.

I made it to the final day of Olivier Gourvil’s¹⁵ exhibition that surveyed recent paintings beside those of Amédée Ozenfant at Galerie Larock-Granoff¹⁶ entitled Rendez-vous avec Amédée, it, like Erik Lindman’s show in Brussels, he was paired with a canonical artist who is in the books but not on contemporary lips. Another relevant match. But here I was concentrating primarily on Gourvil’s surfaces. His paintings are an example of the French interest in what might be called the artisanal in painting, its subject being not so much what it is as how does one go about making it. For example, seeing images of Gourvil’s work, it is hard to make out the construction of it, it’s not straightforward. Some of the black liner elements seem to be the result of removing tape revealing black underpainting. Other areas are painted flatly with a brush, contrasting with surfaces that have a texture from thickly applied oil paint that has been knifed on.

I asked Gourvil about his method, and whether there were many revisions in the process of making the painting, and he said there were very little. So the most exciting creative element for him might be the actual planning of the painting. His drawings have always been marvelous. There were many drawings on hand. It reminded me a little of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite part of making a film was writing the screenplay. Then again Gourvil’s surfaces are quite sensuous. But in general, one of the things I find so interesting about French abstraction is the attitude, just that—it’s more important than the final product. The attitude is what produces the painting.

There is an extraordinary late Matisse show at the Grand Palais, the opening was so crowded when I walked out after two hours there were still lines to get in outside. I’m going back soon.¹⁷