Back from the Peninsula

Towards abstraction

The garden at the Musée du Niel

Dark flowers

Their stems do not thin out; they support sculptural flowers that will survive nuclear explosions.

Ossified dahlias: leather petals, animal skin, fish scales. We touch them.

 

Images: Derek Knight, Troy D. Ouellette, Shawn Serfas

Text, "Deux Avant-Gardes": Catherine Parayre

Jean-Pierre Pincemin. Sans titre. 1979. Huile sur toile. 104 x 127 cm.

The colors sink into their thickness, collapse, find their shapes, take on substance. We dream. Two framed steles, two sealed stories. The eternity of subdued crocus in the fall.

Alfred Manessier. Chant du matin. 1952. Huile sur toile. 100 x 81 cm.

We witness the burial of colors, their final procession. Yet, what momentum, a pyramid under construction, a festive tree padlocked in a stained-glass window. Dawn rises from the meadow.

Claude Viallat. 1976/026. 1976. Colorant sur toile écrue. 292 x 90 cm.

This green that rises, that turns greener and grows like a plant. What is hiding there? A bean tree? The garden is polished, pruned, sculpted. Tree leaves, the entrance to a museum.

Louis Cane. Papiers découpés. 1966. Gouache sur papier découpé et collé.

“Persienne” – in this word, a whistling sound piercing our ears and the Orient at our windows. Yet, it dampens our perceptions – the light, the heat, their outrageous reality – a word for dreams – japonaiseries on the wallpaper of our childhood and our grandparents’ home. We think of birds flying away from the sedate garden, its fossilized flowers, its picture-likenesses – away from its delights, its dream-come-true, its newness. We rest in our perfected room.

Alfred Manessier. Fin octobre. 1948. Huile sur panneau de bois.

The bocage doesn’t fit through the windows – the view over the sky, the incessant voices, the faint headache that will not stop, its impertinence. We will never cease looking over the sea, wondering over the meaning of our words, abandoning them. The countryside is dark, lived in. Animals lie deep in their burrows. We think of craftmanship, detailed landscapes, and the month of October. We think of journal issues. We love radicality and the soft flowers rotting in Posidonia. Our love for paintings, always. We are dedicated. Landscapes are hidden here – stretched-out fields, graves below triangular surfaces, and the poppy mood of peonies. We will look into your graves.

Maurice Estève. Sans titre. 1955. Aquarelle et gouache sur papier.

We look, in doubt, at green lights and torn-apart flags – the city: a perspective, the end of a street, an illusion that quivers in the sun, an answer to our borderlinearity, a washed-out impression. We want to walk, enter the gray light in the depth of the day. We are alone; the city flickers yet remains a knot of tangible layers, a watered-down grave, a destination away from our island and its salt – its pearls – and how it scrapes our skin, our minds. The island never leaves us; we shall spit on flags, look for ways out. The street is ours.

Maurice Estève. Aquarium aux persiennes. 1947. Huile sur toile.

We go for a walk before the shadows abandon the day. Later we will filter their prison-like sequence until night comes. Time is striated into minutes and parallel lines; colours flood in. We try wisdom, slow movements, the contentment of lethargy. In this half-light, we live in an achieved world – a composition, a silent symphony whose measures appease us and fill the afternoon that bears down on us yet makes us happy. We breathe in, out, as slowly as can be. We think of narratives and cannot find any. We find a place in the compact room which summer months design for us. Outside, colours explode; the sea: its vibrancy does not reflect its viscous life.

Jean-Pierre Pincemin. Sans titre. c. 1970. Acrylique sur tissu d’ameublement.

Pink, a striking colour, especially when its flowers tumble down and their black-lined petals fall apart into squares on the soil, a tapestry for cozy eyes, an oleander under the sun. Its withered leaves. These will contract, pale down; they will achieve chaos, and we will look upwards to the sky and the nascent profusion of more pink. In the garden we are partial to the blueness and soft shapes of plumbago flowers. We forget how pink it is inside the room, on the tapestry, in the square memories of falling-down oleander blooms – how much it will disaggregate in front of us, from the ceiling to the floor and through the garden outside the window – the garden before the sea.

Jean-Pierre Pincemin. Sans titre. c. 1987-88. Huile sur toile.

It took us weeks to see a box [a cage to protect us – a refuge for animals in transit, a hole to crawl inside and tame our borderlines] emerge out of this foray of lines jutting out and into us – their poignant force, a wound, a blow to our bodies.

The box is transparent; we see inside, and this helps us. We tame the box and its dark lines – we see the sea, its horizon, its moistness over us – behind our skin, our windows, the formatted garden, its restfulness, the flowery fortress that keeps the sea at bay – smooth, a Sunday at the beach. This box is excessive, an eye-catcher.

Jean Bazaine. La chope. 1943. Huile sur toile.

We cannot always see what we are told. The garden is a game beyond the words given to us. We meet on a warm afternoon at a table under an umbrella, at the back of the garden where there is no sea view. We will align colours, drink fruity drinks, let our sight collapse into the foliage and we’ll think of the sea behind the house for those who sit on the terrace a few steps away from us, invisible. We do not hear them; they come and go. We stay and grab the summer with our full hands.

Charles Lacpique. Marée basse. 1949. Huile sur toile.

We see excavators and war machinery, a military land bordered by blue mountains, the surveillance of what’s to come on each summit. With its towers, its towering lines, its dreams in town, its memories of fishing nets, this is a busy world, a busy port, an end to the world, something we’ll never see again, a mesh of thoughts constrained by time, extended beyond limits, stretched out and loud. We will never come back to the village by the sea. In us, we’ll carry the germs of its demise, we’ll solidify our thoughts.

Jean Bazaine. Couple au bord de l’eau, le soir. 1943-1945. Huile sur toile.

This is a fight, my friend, well-camped on the last irises illuminating the air before night falls, before the strident words engage a face-to-face. Do be ready for square exchanges, for each other’s discovery, for clear outlines and the dark, the overwhelming dark. We read too much; we like water; we will not be erased. Here are two wills, two encounters, imminent, an invasion of the pond – their meeting place, the enclosure they will exceed. Two who dilate, engulf the night, devour the air – so much of it. How can they breathe.

Charles Lacpique. L’embarcadère. 1945. Huile sur toile.

Today we saw a crustacean boat at the dock, by the sea, its chalky splashes of colour. We will ignore the hanging-down flag and will prefer the water’s blues, how they reclaim the light and free themselves from all excesses under the apocalyptic sun, its red shadows, its sting. We like a structured noon and dream of a fishless sea – colours flatten in front of us. The crustacean boat, a relic, a point of interest, a sculpted form entrenched by the deck and its foliage.

Alfred Manessier. Offrande de Noël. 1945. Huile sur papier marouflé sur toile.

Let us sometimes be thankful for brown and how it tones down the spirit, reduces golden thoughts, pushes our mind away. Brown: red and ochre, a rejection and a morass where blood and innards will coalesce. The stained-glass windows in the church implore us to tame the world, to possess it – they recite “musts” and “haves,” scrutinize us yet fail to mesmerize. Their beauty: a prodigious laceration made of striated materials, raw resisting shapes and smoothed lives.

Patrick Saytour. Progression. 1968. Acrylique sur toile.

Stories roll down from the ceiling in concerted order, chapter by chapter, their beginning and end as even as their content. We enter a uniform texture gently wavering when someone walks by at a brisk pace. A story is a story is a story; we will keep this in mind and the plot at a distance, as if behind the low fence in front of a monument to the dead – we’ll show respect.

Louis Cane. Toile tamponnée. 1966. Encre sur tissu. 

Five and a half V-forms tell us we are at the end of what will never be a painting. We face a blue-and-red impossibility, a blocked view, lines of “no pasarán,” a welcome pause. A scorching sun today; twenty-four herons parade past us, fill in the air; we can feel the leisurely summer waving and move away. Our world shuts down. We are kept out of what we see unfolding in front of our eyes. We are happy travelers.

Charles Lapicque. La terre et la mer. 1946. Huile sur toile.

The earth is red, orange, so softly covered that it muffles noise and its furies. Underneath are oceans parceled out into swimming pools around which villas and patios spread effortlessly. The earth is circular, a relentless roundabout. The sea: its support, the placid rock on which to moor.

Jean Bazaine. Les retraités. 1947. Huile sur toile.

Silhouettes dissolve in the garden; they shine like flowers, taper off, are flowers, find their place among the overarching trees. The garden – eminently human: yet it grows – expands – removes us from its grounds, absorbs us. We rest and welcome thoughtfulness, longitudinal exudations that reach the sky above where we cannot see. Inlayed in the garden, we become ornaments. We discover the life of rocks and fossils, we disappear. The garden immobilizes us.

Jean Le Moal. Bateaux au port. 1946. Peinture à l’œuf sur papier marouflé sur toile.

A ponderous port, a marouflaged sea stretched out behind the masts of pell-mell boats thrown one upon another in a landscape that does not care. We are caught by its blue sky, a haven for our eyes, our tired minds. The sun has sunk by the wharf and stays there, moored for years to come, organic in its soil, harnessed – anchored maybe. Through the window we see how it casts speckles on surfaces.

Charles Lapicque. La mère et l’enfant. 1947. Huile sur toile.

An affront: encircling love and stifling curves – the abject beyond the pale, the sun that will never go down. The child crouches under towering forms in the sightlessness of a full sun that crushes the seasons and their many contours.

Jean Bazaine. Pierre, racine, figure. 1950. Huile sur toile.

It takes a while before one can discern the nascent roots under beds of anemones. They crouch under the pebbles and the tectonic plates that make us forget that life is a swarm made of blemishes and sunlit throes.

André-Pierre Arnal. Pliage. 1970. Pigments sur toile libre.

A tilted square is an art of freedom – and grace. It fills a floating space and its four horizons. It opens up when we unfold its creases; it defies golden traditions, their harmonies, and occupies other and better-mastered squares, their number and all other dimensions. A square is a constraint, a calculated risk yet here it stands and defies rule, bears the colour of dormancies – shows us poetic folds and uneven surfaces.

Maurice Estève. Le guetteur. 1951. Huile sur toile.

There is no light tower at the port, only a box on which a red projector lies, just like a watchman ready to emerge out of the night and point at us, surprised culprits for not showing our lights, our truce flags, the few inconsistent bags of light travel – carefree. The watchman – a square force with a spyglass, ensconced between the sea and the coastal garden, the boats and us playing in the cove. A shrine.

Alfred Manessier. Espace automnal. 1951. Huile sur toile.

The last three months of the year command daily gymnastics, an exercise in elasticity, soft summons from blue to yellow. We wander from dot to dot and from kite to kite. We follow elongated forms that might be traces of human presence.

Jean Le Moal. Sur l’eau. 1954. Huile sur toile. 65 x 92 cm.

Fantastic feats arise at dawn, fragrances of nights forever gone. The dawn – neither blue nor mauve, the watchers on alert, the most excruciating hour that does not go away. The alba will linger in the garden and already throws its spikes of tense feelings and acerbated senses. Dawn: the only hour when rain or cold, or shine, do not matter – do not materialize – the hour of too many excesses that flicker one last time. The most uncertain, the most balanced time.

Patrick Saytour. Brûlage. 1973. Peinture technique mixte. 42 x 28 cm.

Burned tapestries – flowers and the souvenirs of our grandmothers’ kitchens – their symmetries and infinite landscapes of finely dotted daisies and pink motifs. All this now calcinated, in the pillory, to be buried later in the hidden craters of a dead sun.

Marc Devade. Sans titre. 1970. Acrylique sur toile. 200 x 200 cm.

To destabilize a colour. It takes two lines – one from top to bottom, stopped by a dark blue frame, and one from bottom to top, blocked in a gray zone just before it reaches the top – to annihilate two black rectangles – one large, the other smaller – and a black stripe, and degrade them to a colour that might be black or a suspected blue that would not be one. Reds too unfold their doubts, and gray looks in part white. Perpendicularity: one safe measure to frame illusion.

Jean Bazaine. Hollande. 1956. Huile sur toile. 35 x 80 cm.

We try not to glimpse at tulip fields and churches seen from a speeding train; we try to forget words, flags, the symbols of places. We would like to just arrest our eyes on the aquae and the old pink patches. We do not want to know; white and its brilliance here are too much clarity; they lean against a landscape we seem to move through at high velocity. Horizontal fields and cities – pouring-down skies over the shallow waters where a place is born. We move further.

Alfred Manessier. Port hollandais. 1955. Huile sur toile. 26 x 35 cm.

We now reach a twin landscape – same shapes, same colours, same underlying places, yet more tightly structured, jellified – no longer fleeting.  We stepped out of the train and are now standing, calmly taking in horizontalities and sedate lines, nature asleep before the sun rises. Maybe we are getting older or less adventurous.

Daniel Dezeuze. Châssis. 1968. Chassis au brou de noix. 185 x 144 cm.

In times of revolution, building a frame – installing it against a wall – is interesting. To posit structure, the violence of grids and space, the force of things rather than the abysses of imagination under the cobblestones, our emptinesses. Nothing by us yet a frame, the limits of what can be, the do’s and don’ts of our objects and our thoughts, a captive space. We admire its elegance, its six possibilities – all equal –, the shadows behind them.

Louis Cane. Toile tamponnée. 1968. Peinture encre sur toile métissée. 125 x 155 cm.

What is a name if not a stamp reused unrelentingly – a mechanized gesture to obliterate its owner, scatter them across the pages, together with an occupation, a passion, their being, the beginning and end of it all. A signature: an excess that says much, as much as it obliterates – the garden, the sun at noon, the red and pink flowers behind the curtain stretched lightly over the windowpanes, not any fabric falling in folds, rather a canvas fixated on the glass.

Patrick Saytour. Pliage. 1969. Goudronyl sur toile libre. 251 x 101 cm.

We see the generous coat of a cow, its taut stomach, its placid rumination. A cow is beige and brown, has soft brown eyes and soft brown spots on its flanks. It glorifies a simple sun, before it grows, becomes complex and loses its brightness, its childlike overflow, before it dissolves into the mysteries of bluish depths.

A cow is just a mass when one stands close to it, a skin from afar – an idea, a few flecks.

 

Daniel Dezeuze. Claie. 1974. Peinture sur bois de placage. 58 x 60 cm.

Again, a fence. On it, red circles, fresh paint dripping, a blocked path. Jammed space, the end of a walk, a few signs on a hurdle. We’ll think of the wire mesh on the windows of the prison nearby, a few kilometers away, of the convicts in saturated cells when it is too hot outside. We feel for them, the density of shapes, the writing on the walls. We think of those who work outside when it is hot, the brutal sun burning objects and the hands that rest on them, the dirty hands on numbered parts that need to be assembled, the dazed eyes that read the instructions top and bottom, open and tear.

Noël Dolla. Sans titre. 1974. Acrylique sur toile. 105 x 105 cm.

The abstraction of a burnished garden; we guess its golden roots; our gaze absorbs its geometries, planned for us to dwell in them; we sense their smells and find our peace. The garden, a furnace under the sun, an enclosure with rare escapes, the centre of our world wanting to be open to the four winds. We look around and see the East, the South, the West and its North. We live buried.

Claude Viallat. 1974/PP055B. 1974. Colorant sur deux feuilles de papier cartonné circulaire. 88 x 88 cm.

One roundel made of cardboard on which colours thicken and get darker. They are stretched out as if to form a target for cruel games. We lack arrows to aim at the rainbow in front of us. There is order, a plenitude, and much evaporated water in these few splashes of colours. We’ll dream of the wilderness and of the round and oblong shapes we find there.

Claude Viallat. 1974/PP046. 1974. Colorant sur deux cercles de carton. 86 x 86 cm.

One more roundel made of cardboard, lighter, again on it a shape that will not fit a circle. A multicoloured snail, a clew of wool, a line that will escape and leave a perfect shape. A thread of thoughts, circular yet slightly askew, docile and soft, yet not quite along the lines ascribed to them. We want to stray away yet are caught in their regularity and highlighted deviances. There is no softness in circles.

Claude Viallat. 1974/PP009. 1974. Colorant sur papier blanc. 102 x 70 cm.

Children playing at the table, breathing air into the straws that, a few minutes ago, brought liquid to their lungs and hearts, organs. They move the straws above the page, their heads gently swaying. Their focus is on the colours they chase across the paper, the pathways they make them take, the curves they trace for them.

This image – children playing at mastering water – is what we want to have in mind. But it is not what is. There are no children playing here. Instead, lines of substance and composed thoughts, a sickly yellow, a farandole of questions, an open field. The day explodes.

Jean Le Moal. Composition. 1956. Huile sur toile. 40 x 33 cm.

We went to the garden to pick poppies and see them die between our fingers. We found black flowers of stone – their beauty, their permanence as long-lasting as the sea outside the gates. Beyond the dark flowers, a full-fledged world receding in a distance that makes us think our world is smooth, made of imbricated cogs forming a scheme of things, the strongest alliance of parts and places. The hard flowers of stone and time weld us together, our vision, make us happy.

Jean Bertholle. Sans titre. 1960. Huile sur toile. 60 x 92 cm.

How difficult it is to enter a bold chiaroscuro; how rewarding and how much fun. There is no scenery to tell, no story to follow. We catch our breath as we see shapes soar – their vigour, a harness to our thoughts, our well-being – the balance of light and matted form. The claire-obscure uplifts us. Summits and bridges, a space that opens up, the dark forest of green backgrounds, the fir trees of safe mountains; we occupy the space offered to us.

Jean Bertholle. Sans titre. 1964. Huile sur toile. 19 x 26,5 cm.

A bird has fallen prey to the morning, its glassy colours, its broken riffs, the riffraff of nature – its orange sun, its accusations watching us. The day unfolds on stage.

Jean Bertholle. Sans titre. 1961. Huile sur toile. 18 x 32 cm.

Two red suns: the watchers of the alba, as they take shape and face the rising sun that wakes us all and tarnishes the remnants of secrets. These suns can sense and smell and touch; they know what surrounds us. Their scrutiny: an illuminated face.

Jean Bertholle. Sans titre. 1965. Huile sur toile. 26,5 x 47,5 cm.

We want to travel to the eye of the storm and to the crashing waves, away from the city. Driving to the coast to navigate an imaginary weather, an apocalypse of roaring forms, an ocean – not a sea.

Patrick Saytour. Cerceau. 1978. Cerceau en bois, filet et objets. 70 x 37 cm.

Again, a roundel. This one, a fisherman’s net, loose, so distended that it will never catch any wriggling. At the top, a small yellow ball; underneath, a red one; another yellow ball and another red one; from top to bottom – a separating line: on one side, the net is dark; on the other, looking thinner, a faded net.

Patrick Saytour. Cerceau. 1978. Cerceau en bois, filet et objets. 56 x 40 cm.

The last roundel – the four small balls – two yellow ones at the top, two red ones below – are tied to the rim. The net: a creel, a trap for fish and sea treasures, a winning game for the hungry, the jealous, those who catch the world. Not long ago, a fisherman – a friendly man – brough us a small shark frozen in death, pallid, so small.

Alfred Manessier. Esch – Les Forges. 1961. Huile sur toile. 50 x 100 cm.

Here is the rain that makes festivities shimmer, that drenches us in its diversity, illuminates our nights and their joyful colours – its puddles, its lakes, the river under siege, the dotted sea on which each drop gushes out and scintillates. We hear the parties’ sounds, their rumble, how it fades through the falling water spreading over the grounds. We stumble; the city and its gardens pulse. We breathe in unison; the rain is ours – its glitter, its coat of light. A choreographed night.

Jean Le Moal. L’été. 1958-1963. Huile sur toile. 139,5 x 130,5 cm.

It takes many years to conjure up a summer – its idea, the dazzle of its colours, the days that have lost their crispness and now rejoice in a culmination of flowers, an excess of green and the purple solitudes of warm hours. We shut the window blinds yet let a slice of sunshine in. This is enough to call a summer yet not enough to grasp its frequencies, its throbbing clutter, the cicada’s song in which we miss the many sounds of excesses and warmth. This is too much, a medley of chirps and touch and eye contacts. An all-in-one season that supports us and will take us though winter and many more summers, their excesses, their beauty, the exhaustion they inflict on us.

Maurice Estève. Toublu. 1973. Huile sur toile. 76,5 x 65 cm.

A hot-air balloon, blue like an ocean, flies over corn fields and patches of green. Orange is rebellious and the sap of life, the floor on which we dance, a contrast with the darker sun. Every detail has been planned, ripped apart and sewn with the cleanest blue thread we could find. We do not know whether we can enjoy neatness after trampling on so much haze and so much listening to the indistinctiveness of narratives. Clarity orders our minds, maybe too much. Thwarting sharp thoughts is what we want to indulge in as we travel on the ocean-like hot-air balloon over the fields.

Jean Le Moal. L’orage. 1962-1963. Huile sur toile. 162 x 114 cm.

We celebrate the pouring rain, the storm, the balls of fire when spectacular nights attract the crowds, the cheering masses, the security guards, the passersby who slip on the sparkling sidewalk, the honking cars in which wet passengers rush into. We see the glistening; we hear it in our ears – its splashes – and feel its quivers under shoe soles. The wind dissolves colours, gives them their freedom and lets them fly away, sink into the drain holes on the streets, in the overflowing gutters. It lets them melt and flow down rivulets of temporality. The storm is an evanescence, the souvenir of footprints and numb fingers too wet to grasp the real impact of things, the solid presence of those trees that guide the street along predicted lines into the heart of the city.

Claude Viallat. 1974/10. 1974. Acrylique sur toile. 273 x 217 cm.

Here is the palace where queens were beheaded and concerts were played. We can still see the frames of windows exposing shame and glut, festivities and puppetry – as if they were boxes in an opera house or at the circus. Yellow and grey mix on five levels – five floors of prison-like delights that will not last. Grey as an end whose pink and bright seeds are not enough to dispel the most ominous spells.

Claude Viallat. 1974/PP008. 1974. Colorant sur papier blanc. 102 x 70 cm.

Lines and lanes – swimming lanes, planes in the sky, waiting lines, the lines on which our clothes dry, lines of thought, and the lines we write on paper. Twenty lines as punishment for a moment of fun. You will copy twenty lines that… the teacher cries. Poetry lines to learn and forget, the graph paper and its millimetre grid for calculations we will never make. We kept the paper – for its regularity and how it catches our attention, the comfort of a page – for its possibilities.

Noël Dolla. No 14. 1975. Acrylique sur toile. 211 x 194 cm.

Inside out – our stomachs when we feel ill, the t-shirts we want to wear, the pockets in which we hope to find treasures, our feelings. In the museum, an inverted frame – joining at the middle – no stretching from side to side – no flatness or perfection. A multiplication of borders: those at the centre – rigid, the frame; and those that vibrate under the airflow – the canvas pinned four times against a wall.

Claude Viallat. 1976/079. 1976. Acrylique sur tissu. 135 x 207 cm.

To abolish borders, garden walls, museum sanctities, colour schemes, and harmonies. To plant those seeds that will go untamed, that no words will describe because their growths and explosions will go unobserved. There is a looseness that makes us wonder.

Marc Devade. Sans titre. 1978. Encre sur toile. 170 x 220 cm.

To stop it all and let a ray of light go through, an emergence that hurts us all. Here is the end of the garden, the Mediterranean lore. Last shades of pink absorb us into the folds of a backward view at what is done.