Tita Reut –
Recently, we’ve seen the arrival of vivid color in your work: a blood red that
affirms life: warmth and pain?
It’s the
only affirmed color that has tempted me. Even the blues of 2001 extended my
prior choice of more attenuated colors.
TR – Up to
this what appears to stand out as link with the beholder, is an enacted
complicity played thru the creamy-whites, questioning the delimitation between
the work and the hosting space?
PE –
Indeed, the red incises the idea of the limit and opening, in the very
continuity of the paintings. With the white paintings, a visual fluidity was
constantly operating, the picture’s border was not determined in an absolute
way.
TR – Isn’t
this question related with the intervention of a new procedure in your practice
which is the photography, itself correlated with the artist’s book approach?
PE – Photography appears in my work in 1995 where,
invited as artist in residence in
Henceforth,
the photography will appear in different forms and processes; printed and
painted in series like “Borderlands” about
TR – What
does the voyage – contemporary in your work with the photographic approach –
represent in the dialogue between here and elsewhere, between the vibrating
static and the unstable “instanciated”?
PE – The
voyage is linked to dream, as my dream of
TR – How,
in your imaginary and in your practice, is balanced the stability of
PE –
These are
harmonies that move me, also winter landscapes that by their plainness
strengthen this simplicity, charged with poetry and enigma. These resonances
landscape/painting bring me to leave my studio and to return there as
transcribed in your poem “atelier-batelier” in the book “Studio”.
For me, the
geoglyphs of Nazdac in
TR – In
your photos, an aspect both offered and veiled is perceptible, like in your
relation to your own image: face barred by sunglasses, pose with back turned…
The same thing happens for the landscapes.
PE – Maybe
by taste for mystery…
As an
example, in
I had the
impression of meeting again the “Freaks” of Todd Browning. A
transit-zone, an old fairy-ground awaiting its demolition. A place of
fascination, in the mirage of the far away and the near, as the closer you get,
the more the shimmering of the amusement theme transforms into ghost-town, into
pollution: destruction already at work with its scattered cables… This “from
afar” view refers again to the cinema which was longtime my only way to travel.
TR –
Another universe is haunting your positioning in color. Because it’s with
PE – It’s
TR – The
whites also manifest this original transparency ?
PE – In
2003, I did the series of white paintings entitled “seen from the angels…” from
the start of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem in which he speaks of inversion. If the
earth is seen from above, seen by the angels, the trees inverted draw strength
and energy from the sky and light: the branches become the roots.
“Seen from
the angels, the tree canopy seems roots drinking the skies…”
The thematic
of the immaterial, of the present/absent is really linked to my relation to
poetry.
TR – The
intervention of red, decisively and tragically, frames the movement of the line
until then left free.
PE – The
movement existed already but the red emphasizes and amplifies. Spatial cut-ups
create a game of depth – front/back, while radicalizing the circulation and
transparencies of the lines on the canvas.
TR –
Quietly, your work on colors and materials operates with paradoxes and
antitheses. Rust calls upon the double idea of destruction and
creation/survival; bee-wax, covering all the paintings is like a skin in its
freshness of life: metamorphosis and protection.
PE – These
two materials deploy in correspondence and derive their guideline thru my
procedures. The rust is in a filiation with the forged iron sculptures. It’s a
material that keeps a volume as it doesn’t stay on the surface, as it eats into
the support. The wax, respectively, stops the oxidation and authorizes the
permanence of the rust on the canvas, without alteration.
TR – The
technical aspect resolves into aesthetic and symbolic decisions?
PE –
Effectively, the wax, this element that appears alive, arrests the process and
the polymerization affirms my taste, or rather my mania of enveloping
everything in hot wax, of protecting what otherwise would self-destruct.
TR – This
analysis confirms that a finished work releases
several possible discourses, sometime contrary, but not contradictory, doubt as
engine for our thinking.
PE – There
is not a unique truth for art or the work. The notion of “completion” is not
read from the works one by one, but from a body of works.
TR – By the
writing of the poem or the painting, we rekindle the theme of the voyage: we know we are going, we don’t know where…
PE – But we
know when we’ve arrived!
TR – The
rusts represent alterations which are proposals. At what moment of your work,
do the scratches intervene?
PE – I
started by engravings, this taste of inscribing things into the matter. Without
the help of the acid to maintain the force of a line, the rust that attacks the
support by the conjunction of iron and water is related, in my eyes, to the
practice of the aqua fortis etching.
TR – These
parallel means of attacking the materials, do they imply a particular notion of
time?
PE – It
takes me a long time to make a painting: at least a fortnight,
however the heat of summer may accelerate the process of oxidation. This
relation to duration therefore also defines a relation to the exterior.
TR – The
time required for the painting is equally required of the spectator. The
matters slowly release lines and details. There exists a generosity of the
“casualness” as the proposals are present but never clamored. The painting
emerges thru the will of contemplation.
PE – This
matches my refusal of dogmatism. I like the painting to propose a subtle
relation in the dialogue: who approaches with questions will find answers.
TR – It’s a
familiar idea to the proposition of the book linked to the intention of the
reader in the “generosity pact” of which Sartre speaks in Situations IV.
PE – I
start this relationship to the book in 1993 with a writer-less portfolio
“vis-à-vis”. It’s in 1997 that were born Werther Editions for a dialogue
text/image with Louis Savary, apropos the sculptures
and metamorphoses. I there invoked the filiation from the forged-iron
sculptures, having passed from leaves and branches to lines and flats, as in
writing.
TR – Can
you develop this genealogy of your work?
PE – I
could joke that as a child I lacked iron! Furthermore, rust, by its aspect,
reminds of the fire beyond the presence of water.
A fire that starts from the rust on the stretched canvas. Its volume grants a sculptural
resonance to the painting and this circulation between the elements and
procedures are what I seek. I’m using oil to intervene on the whites, papers
glued by the wax. And the wax permits me to access the kind of conservation
that reinforces the intemporal which is precious to me. Same, a predilection
carries me towards the paintings of Fayoum that are proposing one of the most
certain and oldest techniques we know of. This is why I refer most frequently
to natural components and to practices which refuse the fashions, the rapid,
the fast, the quick, the much, the fun… I want it to last, want it to take a
lifetime.
TR – Does
the very affirmed philosophical choice of original
substances not limit the artist’s palette?
PE – It’s
certain that my relation to color is consecutively restricted, compared to the
palette of a colorist. In the perspective of natural textures, I only have one
red, one blue… However I’m comforted in this categorization by the fact that
iron oxide is one of the oldest pigments used in art; the red that I’m using is
a very specific Chinese vermillion. These whites, rust and red will remain. But
beyond the care of perenniality, there is also another research that brings me
to this voluntary restriction, and I believe that you found the right word when
you referred to “absolute color”.
TR – The
new series of paintings “in red” let themselves be loved thru the prior phases
of your work. And I recognize a community of sizes. Your operational methods
induce proportions of feasibility?
PE – I
admit a preference for the square; the dimension best adapted to my practice is
in the two by two meters.
Diptychs,
triptychs are possible detours, they are biases and
even games on and with the space. But in this case each part of the work has a
determined and non exchangeable place.
TR – The
playing with the space elaborates perforce thru an interaction with the
“reader”. A mental process associates itself with the sensitive aesthetical
data. For instance, the progression towards the unveiling in
your work. From black to light: a symbol?
PE – In my
first paintings, I made the choice of black. Later the dark fades and I pass on
to clarity.
I’m
thinking of a series of paintings shown in the Chapel of Alspach in
TR – In
this entire contextual network that you claim, there’s a relation to the
literature and to the painting that mixes the history of the arts with the
ancestral link to the public. The play of lines supports your notion of
wholeness: calligraphies interrupted from one canvas to another, they deploy
their continuity thru the works where, with a wink, the initiated may
reconstitute the path.
PE – The
same thing is at work for my artist’s books where the photography, without
attaching itself to a detail, tends toward a unity of images.
TR – The
passages, the recurrences assemble in choreography, a ritual of rhythms?
PE – As in a tapestry. By the way sewing, embroidery, are not absent from my representation
system: they intervene, during the readings of François Villon, in the form of
painted patrons modeling human silhouettes. During that period, I privileged
installations of wax-coated boxes where the elements combined the sewn and the
open.
TR – I find
again the subscription to volume as well as in the line/relief relation. And the alternation of fragile and light.
PE – As
these boxes that weigh nothing have the appearance of stone!
TR – The
irons, the sculptures have inversely the appearance of lightness. You don’t
fear the state-switch?
PE – There
it’s my taste for transfiguration. I enjoy this displacement, this mutation
that paces, maybe also, with subtle transgressions.
TR – Each
work delivering an image sampled from evolution and movement: a state of
metamorphoses…