Painting’s Undiscovered Territory

By Beate Renner. Conversation with Mickaël Faure, Office of Visual Arts

at the French Embassy in Germany (AFAA)

It was five years ago, Beate, that you began a series of traveling exhibitions, "Journey to the East", where you retrace the Silk Route by sea with exhibitions of your work. What motivated you in this project?

　　I wanted to exhibit my work—which comes from a history of Western painting, a Western culture, a Western civilization—in places where the viewer does not have the same codes, theoretical tools or relationship with art. And since I love the sea and its vast infinite spaces, I had the idea of grouping these exhibitions around the ancient maritime Silk Road. These are countries where, with the exception of China, a contemporary art movement is just starting. I have exhibited my paintings in the Sultanate of Oman, the Maldives, Malaysia, the Sultanate of Brunei, Indonesia, and, currently, China. But each exhibition is new, with new works created with the future exhibition site in mind. The goal is to create a confrontation between my work and the gaze of individuals whose cultural context provokes another experience, another reading of the work. 

What do you expect from this other gaze?

　　Here—in France, in Germany, in, shall we say, the West—I pretty much know how people are going to respond to my work. There are certain well-established mechanisms in this little art world. However, all you need to do is look elsewhere and things present themselves differently. That's what is stimulating. You can draw a lot of energy from it. But I should say that my project is far from being simple and restful. That is what is so important about it: art should be a challenge, a source of discovery, something that shakes you internally. In view of this, I am taking a big risk with my Shanghai exhibition, because of the aesthetic orientation of the works I'm exposing. My painting is very gestural, and… Chinese artists and people know gestural painting quite well! Just look at their calligraphy… What's more, right now there is a very "neo-pop"tendency in Chinese painting, a pictorial intention very different from mine. As always, I ask myself, "Will my work hold up in this context? And will I hold up? What pictorial questions will come out of this exhibition?"

　　This project exists to enrich and keep my painting alive through a real confrontation with the outside world, through traveling. And there is nothing more beautiful than returning to painting afterwards with your eyes wide open.

With time, your painting becomes denser and denser. Why this increasing tangle of plant forms, water, lines and colors? Why is your painting becoming denser?

　　This density comes from my gestures as a painter, from this very gestural painting whose space corresponds to a territory and that emits an emotion, a sensation. A territory that I occupy with lines and articulated colors. This singular pictorial gesture could also be expanded to infinity on the left, the right, up, or down… This is where I got the idea to present the Shanghai series paintings as sets, diptychs and triptychs, that could be presented continuously or  with spaces in between the canvases, like airlocks.

　　A pictorial space created this way functions like an organic unit opening out into real space.

　　But it also lights up, thanks to the artistic will that animates it, like a singular space, in all its intensity.

　　It’s in this sense that my work is radically modern, even though I use a medium called "traditional".

Certain contemporary painters speak to us, in their works, of the medium as such, the material possibilities of painting. Even if your work shows your technical mastery of painting, your interest is elsewhere…

　　What is important to me is the direct experience with painting, the reality it opens up for us, the emotions it stirs in us. I work this emotion with my eyes, body and mind, my technique and my experience, as much as a painter as as a human being. This is a subjective, singular vision. But the emotion that comes out of it, I want that to be objective, to be accessible to everyone. 

Emotion: that's a word that brings to mind a phrase of Braque's: "I like the rule that corrects emotion, I like emotion that corrects the rule."

　　Yes, that's exactly it. Emotion that is once again accessible, thanks to the work of the paintings. Painting, for me, is not a quest for the absolute. No. It is something grounded in the here and now. I do not have an idealistic vision of art. Art is not necessarily a good thing, morally, I mean. It is powerful—if not, it isn't art—but it is not good in a moral sense. It does not make people better, or more noble. What interests me is reality: to touch, even for just an instant, through the density of the painting, a piece of reality in all its nakedness. And that is beautiful, since it is aesthetically complex and carries sensations and emotions. A purely critical dimension in an artwork bores me. That's why we have a spoken language and writing! I am looking for a visual event that overwhelms me with emotion, in one way or another.

You often speak of modernity, of being modern. Modern, or contemporary?

　　Since I live and paint right now, my painting is by definition contemporary. To insist on this term doesn't seem important to me. However, it seems more important to declare my modernity, since all art should still, today, be modern. Being modern, to me, means breaking with the surrounding academicisms, instead using your work to refer to the existential dimension that concerns us all.

　　With a few rare exceptions, video, performance art, installation art, leaves me rather cold. Of course, it's also a question of taste, but I find that the majority of these works rarely produce real aesthetic pleasure, since they above all rely on the capacity for reflection, without passing via the senses. These forms of expression are considered today as the most contemporary, the most "avant-garde", but I find they tend to get locked into academicism. These modes of expression are like a kind of straightjacket in which many artists deliberately accept to be bound, and sometimes give a faster legitimacy from people with authority, the decision-makers of the art world. Like a kind of clientelism…

According to you, what is the place of painting in the French art world today?

　　In France, despite the "renaissance" of the past year or two, I have the impression that you still almost have to apologize for being a painter. Painting is considered as very outdated. Personally, I don't care about this. I remain convinced that painting has infinite possibilities and that you can reinvent it every day. But painting leaves your hands dirty… I mean, you invest yourself in it completely, body, emotions, culture, savoir-faire—all your being—and that leaves traces on you. Painting is not for the lazy or the faint-hearted. It’s an athletic effort, a real commitment, because you're obsessed with it each and every day.

Standing in front of your paintings, I don't have the impression I'm in the presence of a work confronting me with a radical otherness, a difference that forces me, in response, to return to myself and bringing on an inevitable introspection. On the contrary, I feel almost invited to enter the work, into that which you call“landscape”. An abstract landscape as it were, an interior landscape, where it is not the viewer that embraces the work, but the work that draws in the viewer.

　　Yes, it's very rhythmic, it's a bit like dance. That's why we used this quote from Céline: "I don't mind shedding tears, but while I'm dancing." Of course, it's also very sensual… This is why I've called the paintings of this series Caporeia I/II/... Caporeia was originally a dance of the black slaves of Brazil—and their sole means of expression. Painting, therefore, as a gesture affirming the subject, a movement that occupies a given space and appropriates it. An emancipation of the subject through aestheticism… And there, I think about Céline again, who insisted his whole life on  "style", "one's style", defined as the "little thing" possessed by each of us, which we must develop without trying to conform to any kind of academicism… That's what I do with my painting, a painting infused with self. And the emotion that comes out of it is like an enchantment.

What is this enchantment you're talking about, you who deny searching for the absolute?

　　It's a "secular enchantment " that comes, as I just said, from an emotion, a sensation. But be careful, there's no sentimentality in that. It is a singular, dense vision that acts on whoever stands in front of the work. And that person, looking at the painting, can have an experience as intense as mine, as the painter's, adjusting it in his or her own way. The viewer, too, can have this liberty.

Cologne, November 1, 2002