What has happened to last lessons of contemporary painting ? How much of it could the institutional experts remember ? Painting was “passage”. They turned it into “impasse”.
Passage is always a transition between “something before” and “something after”. Revisionist people preferred to conceal all these lessons of painting as to obstruct his development.
Lets come back where reinterpreted History has been reduced by such an essential “passage” !
What means “passage” ? What went one , what’s going one and what will happen with painting ? In other words , what is passing across the painting surface ?(1)
The canvas, especially the rectangular format is the place where painting is going past. That is” painting material”, which is passing across the surface. Coming from outside, it crosses the format before going out again in one or several places. By passing it is declaring space inside the rectangle. The passage of painting ( material) is at the same time the place and the moment of the crossing implying a correlation between the surface and the time of the passage. That is what “painting passage” gives us to see and feel/ By crossing the canvas, the shapes are subjected to the speeding variations and to the constraint of the format. Firstly, “passage” is movement.
Jackson Pollock was the first artist to express with force the “passage” in painting. His drippings dropped in and out on every sides of the canvas.
Without referring to “passage” ,what can one think about Pollock’s painting ? Somebody wrote recently in a forum that any else drunk man could have done similar artworks ! Without considering “ passage”, action painting would be ranked as painting of drunkard or more courteously with minimalist painting as ” abstract expressionism”.
Certain painters have conceive their pictorial process from the concept of the “passage”. We can find this reference in the works of certain artistes issued from the movement Support- Surface as Viallat in France and more particularly in USA with the paintings of Newman, Noland and Kelly.
It seems to be Barnett Newman who underline in the most obvious way the idea of the passage. His first works hesitated between horizontality and verticality , prolonging the questioning posed by Malevitch or Mondrian.
From its Period of the” zips” Newman “ declares space without sharing it” What did he want to mean ?
All critical analyses have quite understood that zips continue out of the canvas , on the wall to infinity. That was a first understanding of the idea of the passage (unfortunately forgotten nowadays !).
However, when Newman quotes “ space”, the concept goes further. Let’s imagine in space an object circulating at the speed of light, like a laser beam ( for example). It is cylindrical, so it is in 3D. However if we look it straight in the face, he seems flat as it would be in only 2D ; We can observe the same phenomenon with Barnett Newman’s zips. The object subjected in the same time to speed of light and to the compression due to the limits of the format would appear in 2 D. This is how the third dimension can pass across the canvas without needing “trompe l’oeil “techniques .
Can only an artist grasp what another artist mean to say ? We wonder why the “passage “in painting, which was a great lesson of the painting of the second part of the 20th century has been forgotten to such a point.
Revisionists have put in the shade Newman’s lessons. They renamed “action painting and minimalist painting” as abstract expressionism”. By erasing al traces of the “passage” , they deprive d painting of all possible continuations of this concept.
We meditated for a long time about “passage”. Newman’s lines seem the purest form to express the crossing of the rectangle at the speed of light.
However ve coulf not continue to stand inside the pictorials limits of such a total abstraction.Would the same concept be applicable to figuration ? While changing a little the speed, which flatters the forms, all became possible.
Let’s imagine a human figure coming from space and just crossing the rectangular suface of the canvas ! A small deceleration as regard speed of light is enough tomake it undergo the double deformations due to the rate of the passage as well asthe constraint of the format. This is the principle which Supranaive figuration is based on.
Sceptical people probably wonder how a human figure could cross space. Anyway, all phantoms, spirits angels or other entities supposed inhabit cosmos got nothing to do with Supranaïve figuration.
Let’s imagine the view of a human body through a transparent spacialship ! Of course they would be in 3D. The rate of passage and the view from above give the impression that they would be flat, thus in 2D. This is what to show our artworks.
So it seems obvious that the passage of the figure in the format cannot be compared in one way or another to the classical representation which shows only a part of the body. Painting of portrait or bust is only a centring of the figure who stays static. On the contrary, passage is movement.
The example of spaceship must not make assimilate “Supranaïve figuration “ to science fiction. It is just a way tomake understand the third dimension in the figuration without the perspective. Supranaïve figuration is conceptual. From the lessons of the abstract passage in the painting, we come to the “figural” passage. May understand people who want it. The others will continue to see in Pollock’s works a painting of drunkard, in Newman’s zips simple lines that a child would be able to do and in “Supranaïve figuration “ a naïve painting or a bad drawn.
Passage of the figuration in 3D without “trompe-l’oeil” belies the ideas that painting is an art out of date. People thinking so will only pass but historical painting will continue.
(1 )in french : Que s’est -il passé, que se passé t’il, et que se passera t’il en peinture ou plutôt qu’est ce que passe sur la surface à peindre ? ).
photo : Martina Charbonnel 2006 "passiflore" 146x114 acrylic on canvas
