PHAINÓMENON
Franck Balland
« This modern willingness to clear up and to explain everything makes me tired.
I do not say that it is necessary to maintain a complete obscurantism, but shadows have qualities of lighting that are as interesting as the big glass windows of modernism. We need those hidden parts. »
Jean-Luc Moulène
There is neither water nor electricity in Aurélie’s workshop, by the bank of Mantoue, in Nevers city. Over a hallway, which she uses as storage, we can reach her workspace by a narrow staircase. The walls are painted white, the floor is covered with a greyish palimpsest and from the two windows, we see the river Loire, the concrete of the cultural center, some trees, the skatepark and the bridge which leads cars to the South of the city. From these windows, the greyish light penetrates, a characteristic of the sky of Nevers. A monochrome light, whose pale tint adds burden to the horizon for days, sometimes weeks, even months, and which swallows everything in its wet thickness, as if emerging from the river. It is necessary to imagine the light infiltrating the walls and floor of the workshop, the surface of shelves carefully organized, irradiating the tacked images and slowly bringing to light, in their various states of completion, the productions appearing from them.
I always perceived in Aurélie Belair's pieces of art the expression of a questioning about language. I remember canvases covered with soft colors, almost atmospheric and sometimes color gradient, with thin white lines. The dynamic form of the lines evokes a commitment of the body in its tangled frames whereas the title of the series, Vocabulary (2014), suggests that something could have been unravelled, if not read. There is another group of artworks entitled Speech Less (2015), with a vibrant color range, that translates an aggressive and sharp gesture, reaffirming in a direct way the discreet nature, if not mute, of those paintings. It was a question of language with those two examples, but it wasn’t so much to lead us in the linearity of a meaning subject that in the chaos of orphan signs, rendered to a materiality that highlights the pictorial experiment. Vocabulary and Speech Less inaugurated then a paradoxical research, associating the progressive darkening of the speech and the apparition of a clear syntax specific to painting, the only coherent structure capable to say what the artist would agree to tell us from now on.
One of the current resilience of Aurélie’s practice would be situated in an attitude which seems alternately darkening and enlightening: the artworks are characterized by a certain simplicity, borrowing the rudimentary aspects of ritual or primitive objects, which hide acts before their realizations. The series Amulet (2018), created at the Vortex’s workshops summons a multiple imaginary: kind of autonomous mats or narrow totems.
The artist pursues in parallel the history of a minimal “affected” installation, whose roots tie her to the felted environments of Joseph Beuys as much as the organic sculptures of Lygia Clark or Eva Hesse. By giving a spatial rhythm of wandering to the visitor across them, the Amulets maintain an essential dialogue with the place of their presentation but also represent the singular conditions of their elevation.
The successive knots which compose them express the role of the hand and the implication of the body in the twisting of the materials. This vertical « landscape », as the artist likes to qualify, embodies a unified sum of time, the artistic gesture resounds like the production of rites for its obsessive and alienating effects: the alibi of an overtaking that would lead to a soft trance.
At the entrance of the show, Aurélie Belair installed a video, M. qui défait les noeuds (2018), seems to echo to the columns of fabric exhibited upstairs. The hands that made the knots are now the ones that set free, they collaborate harmoniously. Sweeping the immaculate whitening of the screen, seen from the underside, accentuates their influences and symbols. These are Muriel's hands, a magnetizer operating. We can find this therapeutic tilt in her canvas Sans titre, Dialectic des Hiérophanies (2018): the circular frame of a cotton canvas is perforated with multiple nails and screws. It composes a spiky and metallic ring standing out of picture rails.
Installed in situ at Les Ateliers Vortex, the artwork refers to healer statuette Minkisi, which wizards pierce with sharp objects used in ceremonies intended to cure patients, near the Kongo river. The piece is using the hanging system of painting in order to deal directly on the surface, to invoke a protective power.
One of the ambitions of modernity, as underlines Jean Luc Moulène in the excerpts that I decided to put in the beginning of this text, was to produce a rational speech on all the elements building the human life context. Within its activities and beliefs the modern society will have to lead a project of « unveiling », which consequences find their paroxysm in what the German philosopher Byung Chul Ham calls « the society of transparency »1. The need of visibility is also the cause of the multiplication of the role of the « mediator », which, in the domain of art and others, solves little dramas due to lack of comprehension, a contemporary art trend, which the exhibition « Phainómenon » contributes to, keeps on making itself irreducible to every literality and rushes into complex and subjective territories, where the artwork is not only a translation but an object with intimate ghosts of experience and belief. To the blinding clarity of stories that aren't emancipating anymore, the troubled lightning of commitment that refuses the hoaxer’s speeches recalls, in the wake of Susan Sontag that « we don’t need, in art, a hermeneutics, but an awakening of the senses. »2
[1] Byung-Chul Han, La société de transparence, PUF Paris 2017.
The author defends in this book a critical point of view on the contemporary insistence to make even information accessible and readable, which according to him leads to a control society.
[2] Susan Sontag, Contre l’interprétation, 1964
Independent art critic and exhibition curator at le Palais de Tokyo, Franck Balland successively worked in the Institute of Contemporary Art of Villeurbanne, Parc Saint-Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux and at the Marcelle Alix gallery, Paris. From 2014 to 2017, he co-directed Tlön, in Nevers, with Jennifer Fréville.
amuleto
« It’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of compa-nionship and love. »1
Free from the object-picture idea, the tools of painting are used to only keep the “sidelines”. The marks created by the work done within the studio are seized to make what usually remains experimentation visible. Conversely to a scientific experiment, the practice does not benefit to any hypothesis or statement. In a constant reformulation, the formal recycling confines to a stammering state. This methods thus justifies a serial work, in which the remai-ning material becomes an absolute one, in other words it becomes a deed.
Untitled – Amulet (2016-2017) gathers thirteen sculptures in a landscape made of sizeable canvases (linen, hemp, cotton, shipping canvas...) tied up as South African amulets. Traditionally, the knots personify the desire to control everyday life practical aspects. To knot is a symbol: metaphorically, the hand activates the world.
Because of its original definition, we commonly think that the amulet – a masculine noun used in the Critical Dictionary of French language (1787-1788) – is a lucky charm to carry with you. However, woody vines’ knots as seen in the forest, which represent a great power for ties and connections, can be found in various African populations. In order to get protection from the nature’s genius, seen as a hostile environment, the amulet uses its own elements (wood, roots, cotton, minerals...).
More than the animistic idea, which makes the natural process a spirit, the artwork lies in the process of creation itself. In the case of an amulet, this is a wish conceptualized in the primitive gesture of making knots; in case of an artwork, it is the thought. In a performative action, the meaning merges with the enunciation: « It’s not described, it’s happening. »2
The works are the testimony of a previous confrontation, invisible like the amulet, which is “the continuation, even remote, of a rite which works without ceremony. ”3 The painting’s canvas carries, centralizes and celebrates the past facts: it vestiges the work. The object sets up duration. It is a totem for an event that took place in a coincidence between intentions and luck.
Border with the exotic, the project gives a land to the encounter with anthropologic culture and cult. It marries the cultural and dogmatic inheritance of writing with the traditions from the language’s replicas and mutations. Untitled – Amulet (2016-2017) invests the transmission’s in-between – oral or gra-phic – of the elements of belief. The project necessary characterizes these dialectics since the thing, said over again, endures evolutions and the thing, written, decides by its alien positioning. Thus, the idea of concept tends towards the one of spiritual. It becomes individual and abstract.
[1] Amuleto, Roberto Bolaño, 1999, Christian Bourgeois publisher, 2013, p.44
[2] Cy Twombly, Interview with David Sylvester, 2000, Fage Editions 2016, p.28
[3] Amulettes et talismans d’Afrique noire, Laure Meyer, Sépia Editions, 2010, p.10
COLOUR AND FUGUE - excerpt
Hubert Besacier
« The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page ; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision. »1
Once the creative drive desinhibited, it’s time to sort through what has emerged.
Once the stake set and the cards dealt, it’s time to take the matters in hand.
During this liberating phase, it is crucial to show critical lucidity, to get a grip of oneself in order to eliminate what has unwittingly found its way on the canvas. Refine, with a sharpened mind, to get to the heart of the matter. Clear the lines of force to focus on meaning. Cool down and organize without losing the impulse, the primal energy - jaunty, vital, euphoric. The artist now must aim for a higher level of satisfaction – satisfaction of progressing on a solid ground – and the spectator wants to take part in an experiment that drives him beyond the simple visual elation.
In Aurélie Belair’s work, the transformation is quickly visible. It is quite rare – not to say exceptional – to see a pictorial discourse and the technique underlying it decant so rapidly. What appears throughout her increasingly rigorous research is directly connected to her other artistical practices – photography or installation.
In Aurélie Belair’s last photo series, the word is used for the first time. Phrases are superimposed on images. Linking writing and painting represent a logical continuation of her exploration. But, since it’s the word that connects with the painting, preference is given to the manual quality : the printed character gives way to the scription, the physical act of tracing.
(...) With VOCABULARY, Aurélie Belair’s work gets convincingly organized with full-blown rigour. Once the series’ necessity makes perfect sense, the serial process can be initiated. A creative quest is on the move, with its inherent variations. A series cannot indulge itself in the serendipitous happiness of sensation, it goes through various metamorphosis and articulations. Each new avatar is the logical consequence of the previous one.
The all-over recurrent in VOCABULARY varies in a steady way : an interlacing in white chalk or pastel scratches a coloured background at a regular and perfectly controlled rate, in a gesture of systematical obliteration.
The same technique is applied to the SPEECH LESS series (at the beginning of 2015), when the artist switches from paper to canvas.
More recently, in the STATE OF series, the two medium – writing and painting – are differentiated. The sizes are more modest. The pictorial part occupies a canvas mounted on a stretcher, which doesn’t support a gestual interweaving anymore. It’s more of a monochrome partially abraded, speckled, stained, interestingly enriched in materiality and depth. The graphic
part has seceded : it’s now the second panel of a diptych. Its lines intertwine on the white surface of a marouflaged linen canvas. As if the structure of the first panel was inverted, the canvas is now embedded in a wooden frame painted in white, enhancing its difference in nature.
The script is also organized differently. The interlacing, the tracery disappear in favour of an horizontal configuration. The writing of the previous works has eventually found its own field.
The grapheme has evolved into distinct, shifting, overlapping lines. Their movement, like the lines of a fugue, contrasts with the layers of colour, the vast expanses of pigment.
The diptych can be seen as an open book separating the matter from the idea, the text from the illumination. Mirroring the surface to the groove.
The caesura slicing through the superficial appearances operates between two acts. Instead of simply revealing itself, with an enticing spontaneity, the work gains a new, more nuanced, mystery. By dissociating physically, spatially, two mental images, Aurélie Belair establish a dialectic between the coloured plane and the writing, thereby duplicating the possibilities of variation for each work.
This dichotomy initiates a dialogue, an interaction between two elementary principles : colour and scription. The work is not inscribed in the moment but in its own duration – a duration set by the work itself. Thus, the spectator’s look going back and forth has the time to absorb this confrontation.
[1] DELEUZE Gilles & GUATTARI Félix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Les éditions de minuit, 1991, p. 192
Born in 1946 in France, Hubert Besacier is an art critic and curator, member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (A.I.C.A.). From 1978 to 1983, he was the codirector of the « Symposium International d’Art Performance », involving 135 international artists. From 1983 to 1996, he was the head of « A PRIORI » (exhibits, publications, artistic projects). Until 2011, he worked as a professor in various Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d’Art : Ecole d’art in Marseille Luminy, Ecole Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche (Villa Arson) in Nice, Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Bourges, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Dijon. He’s a member of the Divisional Research Fellow Curtin University (Perth, Australie), and a long-time collaborator of Gilbert Fillinger and the Maison de la culture d’Amiens, especially for the festival « Art, Villes & Paysage ».
A PREHITORY OF DISCOURSE - excerpt
Laure Jaumouillé
« This is the work of discourse within us. And this difficulty is expressed in this way : the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing, and to no longer know it would be necessary to no longer speak. »1
If everything, in Aurélie Belair’s work, echoes the language, it’s only to emphasize the artist’s ambivalent attitude towards it. Her passionate love for words is coupled with a jubilation to denominate, while her artistic practice emerges from a deeply felt loss - for the omnipotence of signs is just an illusion. The inner experience described by Bataille exposes this mirage, and the realization that ensues necessarily questions our modalities of being. If the world defy the language, then we must find a new way to shape it.
(...) Aurélie Belair’s pictorial praxis is comparable to a descent in the abyss of the renunciation of discourse. Through its very triviality, the gesture of spreading a colored matter on a surface seems to reflect the urgency of her attachment to the world. The titles of her works denote a residual trust in the evocative power of language, each one pointing to the mark or the fragment of an irredeemable persistency.
(...) The contamination of the canvas2 by snatches of discourses half erased resonate with the vibrations of a rejected voice, the remains of the language’s dogmas. Soon, these tiny relics leave room to what can be referred to as « the allusive field of writing »3. Scribblings and erasures, through their arrangements, charts a prehistory of language. Celebrating the error as the founding act of writing, Aurélie Belair’s practice inscribes itself in a continuous aesthetical process whose conclusion eludes us.
Each of Aurélie Belair’s painting is like an aborted speech, the staging of a linguistic suicide. Nonetheless, each work is marked by a fluctuating alternation, the memory of a sentence, of its syntax, the tenderness of a prose, the harshness of an insult.
(...) In this farewell to the rustle of language eventually emerges an irreductible pleasure principle.
[1] BATAILLE Georges, L’expérience intérieure, 1943, Editions Gallimard, 2009, p. 25
[2] But Who Wants An Easy Life, It’s Boring !, 2014
[3] BARTHES Roland, Ecriture, Non multa sed multum, in Yvon Lambert, Catalogue raisonné des
oeuvres sur papier, volume 6, 1973-1976, Multiplia Edizioni, Milan, 1979
Laure Jaumouillé is an art historian and critic for the review 02. She has published in Mouvement, artpress and Frog. Starting in September 2009, she worked on the Centre Pompidou Metz’s inaugural exhibition « Chefs-d’oeuvres ? » under the direction of Laurent Le Bon, before joining the programming department as a director of research and exhibitions ( « Erre, variations labyrinthiques », « Vues d’en-haut »). Since October 2012, she has followed the Experimentation in Art and Politics program founded by Bruno Latour at Sciences Po (SPEAP) while teaching cultural politics, focusing on the subject of international artistic dialogue, to Masters students in the cultural concentration of public affairs.
