piece of writing of a young artist, contemporary art, visual art

I decided not to touch up and to make no correction in my written texts, young artist, in 1980s. They explain the starting point of my researches and my artistic activity with all awkwardness, naivety of a young artist in its workshop faced with its creation. (These texts accompanied several exhibitions as " ephemeral Gardens " and the first Lyons biennial "OUT" of contemporary art in France.

First glance, first question : Are my works fragments which have been torn away, uprooted and then exhibited, or a chaotic and hazardous assemblage, warering in a combination of destruction and reconstruction ?

All fragments here are systematically made of new materials, and this case, they are not a part of something that "has been", but fragments of a birth.
At the beginning, there is conciousness of... conciousness of a frontal space. When I am in front a wall, in my studio for instance, I have in mind one or several mental images - but not the concept of the "Quadro" (painting).

The first process already splits this space : I hang a transparent PVC film on a very large metallic frame, and I set up between the frame and the wall strong light-spots (1 or 2 Kw), which will light the plastic and leave the wall in obscurity. The PVC film becomes a catalyst of light, through the imperfection of its transparency, and because the heat of the light-spots puts steam on it. The presence of this frontal space is intensified by this light source creating a facticious wall. When I paint on PVC, I get the feeling to paint directly on light, and through the violence of the ligth facing me, through the transparency, I come to the materialization of a frontal space between the wall and me.

Te second process is a choice between a plane surface and a volume. In both cases, the plastic film is "destructured" with cutting-outs and heat - It's the birth of a first fragment, the "Original Fragment" (or "Base Fragment"). The more my thoughts get concious of this frontal space, the more it splits up and grows with the adjunction of other fragments (of walls, tiles...). In this elaboration I don't know "whether I go to the wall, or the wall comes to me".

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I have always been fascinated by the "vis inertiae" of material. For a material, inertia is the resistance to movement linked to its mass. Each material has its own inertia - oil, acrylic, glass, granite, wood, plastic, iron, aluminium,... It's a specific value for each material, reaching beyond the limits of its own physical laws; it becomes a suggestive value, wich sole conciousness lies in the radiance of its own dialectic.

The inertia of material may be seen as the fruit of a "Resonance"; from its very substance, and in the depths of its bowels, it may reveal an "Organic Sonority". Depending on the act, or the intervention, the organic sonority changes, its variations may be identified as "PHONEMAS" (sonant elements of language). The connection of silence and inertiae opens a new field of investigation, another world, and above all another language.

The different materials (of everyday use, and non-precious) : tiles, paper, cardboard, plaster, PVC film, are transposed, their previous "oder of importance" (sign, value, fonction,...) is transgressed in order to reconstitute a new "self value". For instance, the transparent PVC Film becomes a full space when the ligth goes through it, but this new space is ephemeral.
The subject intermingles with the materials being represented (presented again), and its object is an organic composition, where the language of material, the "phonemas", provide a new palette.

Each material is taken into consideration, from the pigment to the light, nothing is excluded. As to my object, the absence of references withdraws it from figurative or abstractive art. No writing, whether philosophical or spiritual, is mine. Therefore, all fragments brougth together don't vibrate but with their own being, their interactions. They are no parts of a whole, an entity, like the painting, but a CONSTELLATION.

lili-oto