I am not an advocate of a return
to painting, nor an agent of post modernism, but part
of a generation of modernists aware of a heritage, a
child of ruins and catastrophe. François Rouan |
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Françios Rouan is the type of painter that I had always
hoped would be at work in France today. With so much of the
great painting of our modern epoch having come out of French
culture, its language and its way of thinking it seemed natural
to assume that there must exsist a painter with an eye on the
implications of such a heritage. However during the eighties
when the market and the institutions of the art world were trumpeting
the return of painting, Rouan was strangely passed over and
a younger generation of artists such as Garouste and Blais stole
the international limelight as French representatives of the
zeitgeist of the time. In retrospect perhaps Rouan was lucky
to have escaped the ‘hype’. Although what he still
lacks in international reputation is amply made up for by his
standing within France. Many would go so far as to say Rouan
is France’s most important living artist.
Rouan is an artist who manages to square a circle with a mind
that is responsive to the extreme intensities of French thought
whilst engaging with painting at its most physical level. He
follows a path that many French artists have trodden. It is
easily forgotten that Matisse’s progress as one of the
most radical sensualists came out of a complex and sometimes
painful intellectual inquiry. In the three decades that comprise
Rouan’s work there is not only an impressive body of painting
but there is also evidence of a rich web of discourse that ranges
from the political to the sociological and the psycho-analytic.
Such a relationship to ideas and theory in the visual arts is
usually seen as the preserve of a more conceptual practice.
Rouan’s early years as an artist coincided with the turbulent
time of the sixties. Politics were important to him and events
like the Algerian war led him to align his support with the
Maoists. Yet painting never became a crude support for agitprop
or socially significant practice. He cast his net wider than
that with an understanding of the radical political nature of
constructivism and the Bauhaus as instruments of an ideal society
which seemed within reach. In France around 1968, left-wing
and predominately Marxist thought was providing the tools to
evolve conceptual models of society within which practitioners
such as artists could exercise complex yet strategic positions.
An example could be found in the writings of the Situationalist
Guy Debord who was even then prophesising the emergence of global
capitalism where societies would be dependent upon spectacle
and amusement to socialize its members into the emerging opiate
of consumerism. It would seem that Rouan at this time responded
to such ideas by focusing upon painting’s complex relationship
with human scale and the body. His reference though would shadow
the ever fragmentary nature of the representation of the human
body in a modernist history of painting. Rouan has never engaged
in holistic mirror like representation relying on the false
comfort of a suspect and nostalgic humanism. Rouan’s painting
depicts the body in fragments, as imprints or as traces.
From 1971 until 1978 Rouan went to Rome and painted at the Villa
Medicis which is the French equivalent of the British School
in Rome. Balthus was the director of the Villa and an unlikely
yet warm relationship built up between the two painters. Unlikely
because Rouan’s work at the time was uncomprimisely abstract
and somber and bore no obvious affinities to the much senior
artist. Les Portes, his first major series of works were made
in Rome. They have become known also as “tressages”
because of the technique employed where strips of canvas are
literally woven together. These works relied on subtle plays
of elements appearing and disappearing, upon repetitions and
the sense of how the smallest element is incorporated into a
larger dimension. These seemingly abstract works relied upon
the viewer encountering them in an emphatic way. These doors
could not be breached if viewed from a perspective that painting
was merely an inverse realm of a world of pure transparency.
Moreover Rouan has even spoken of how photographing these works
was impossible.
It was les Portes that first brought Rouan into contact with
Jaques Lacan. He had heard about the problems of photographing
them and asked to see them. He ended up acquiring some drawings
and a relationship evolved between the painter and the psychoanalyst.
What attracted Lacan to Rouan’s work is open to much speculation
but Rouan has located the ideas of Lacan’s that interested
him. It was the concept of a void which seemed to be the link
between the two men. Rouan has pinpointed Lacan’s notion
“when one approaches the central void which is most interior
to the subject and which we call jouissance, the body tears
itself to bits” as being of particular interest to him.
Rouan echoes this concept himself when he says “Art finds
its necessity when it reaches this capacity to construct a central
void that, by means of its very invisibility, manages to indicate
the blind spot that is at the center of our thirst for beauty.”
From this vantage point Rouan could examine the modernist epoch
not merely as a history of formal developments where the engine
of ‘originality’ would push toward an increasingly
fragmentary representation of the world and the human body.
Such fragmentation could more readily be seen as an aspect of
consciousness which concerns truth about the status of the pictorial
object rather than just a story of formal innovation. Rouan’s
present exhibition Jardins Taboués at the Musée
Villeneuve d’Ascq near Lille includes a series of paintings
which are meditations derived from two Picasso nudes from 1908
and 1909, one of which is from the museum collection. Picasso
in the first decade of this century pushed the figure toward
a faceted and stark dismemberment under the influence of African
art. The votive power of Picasso’s images of that period
challenged the devotion painting to the particularity of appearances.
These images mark the departure of painting from pure visuality
into a darker possibly more primal, visceral world. Rouan’s
return to such motifs in the spirit of a copyist is a type of
credo and recalls many other French painters who have staked
their colours to artists of the past as way of moving forward.
The exhibition at Villeneuve d’Ascq concentrates on paintings
from the early eighties until the present. His paintings generically
known as Stücke from around 1988 move like a mood swing
toward a series known as the Coquilles which are still in progress.
The word Stücke comes from “Shoah” the film
about the Holocaust where an eyewitness described the corpses
as “stücke”, as inanimate pieces. These paintings
are caught within the dynamic of cubist collage and the obscene
systematic mass destruction of human beings in this century.
Like Keifer who juxtaposed the ambiguity of Wagnerian motifs
with the realities of German history Rouan seeks a rhyme and
even an ethical discussion between geometric dismemberment and
the horror of industrialized genocide.
The atmosphere of the Coquilles strike a different note. Here
actual imprints from bodies are made onto canvas in a way that
echoes Yves Klien. This relationship of the imprint of the body
dates back to a series of paintings made in the early nineties
entitled The Taboo Garden. The reference is toward desire and
the tabooed zones of the body which are the focus of the imprinted
flesh. However another echo is detectable in the Coquilles which
opens up another area of discussion about this aspect of Rouan’s
production.
The Genius of Venice exhibition held at the Royal Academy, London
in 1984 was notable because of the effect one painting had upon
a generation of artists. It was Titian’s great Flaying
of Marsyas which was then not widely known. Its effect was spell
binding. I was a student at the time and visited the painting
many times. On each occasion I’d find myself amongst a
huddle of spectators many of whom I recognized as other artists.
Rouan also visited the exhibition and he too witnessed the gruesome
sight of the upside-down Satyr being skinned for losing the
musical contest with Apollo. The stripping away of the dark
dionysiac skin by the powers of Apollianian measure and rationality
struck Rouan as deeply as many others who saw that painting.
It has been said that Titian’s image is in essence a breakthrough
in a transition between a classic to a modern age. This is perhaps
so and it is thus no coincidence that the aged Titain replaced
a mirror like and transparent articulation of space for a more
opaque surface metered by somber tactile values and uncompromising
marks of the brush.
In the Coquilles (literally translated as shells) Rouan prints
his own body onto a surface which is submerged in a opacity
of marks. In this process Rouan flays his own body. His skin
becomes the membrane for a transfer technique which is essentially
monoprinting. The density of the surface and the effect of the
body marks creates a multiplicity of readings. Exteriority and
interiority are equal possibilities in these pictures. They
allude to the border condition that painting can so succinctly
inhabit. The equation of positive marks and negative body traces
cancel themselves out so that the picture becomes a type of
void which as I have described before is at the core of Rouan’s
thinking. The corporal negative imprints are of the tabooed
parts of the body which have become rejected and repressed into
an other and that have taken a shroud of concealment. Rouan
does not seek to merely reveal that which is normally concealed
within something we choose to call an unconscious. His gambit
is more a type of hide-and-seek where a quality pops out only
to disappear into another schema. The Coquilles in this sense
relate directly to the Tressages. The binary game of weaving
strips of canvas into a greater fabric was also a type of hide
and seek where as much of the painting remains concealed as
revealed. The cancellation or abscences within this duality
suggest the importance of such a discussion of a psychic void.
The other will always remain un-namable. The other will always
be displaced by rationalistic systems and remain in shadowland.
All that can be hoped for is an intimation of what is at the
heart of our condition. A painting can become a place for an
encounter with what will always remain a suggestion, an intimation
of what is essentially an absence or a lacking. Rouan, as always,
amply articulates this;
“Art finds its necessity when it reaches this capacity
to construct a central void that, by means of its very invisibility,
manages to indicate the blind spot that is at the centre of
our thirst for beauty. Dizzying notions that are not given to
our experience in the large movable mirror that we call psyche,
but in the very picture where the circulation of the soul between
life and death leaves its mark, as though in wax - persona -
in the breaches where light and shadow split.”
It seems that Rouan is treading a path which curiously links
him to an artist like Gerhard Richter. With Richter there is
also an awareness that painting inhabits a curious position,
that it has become embroiled into an aesthetic of negation due
in part (in the case of Richter) to its relationship with photography
which took over from painting in the domain of mirror representation
thrusting it into the relative instability of abstract, non-mimetic
practices. Richter incorporates the endless sense of a switching
between the polarities of painterly potentials into his regime.
Polarities that move between expression and construction; mimesis
and rationality. Rouan inhabits a similar territory except the
readings of his work differ. Lacan is significant to Rouan whereas
Adorno’s writings can be used to form the backdrop of
a critical discussion around Richter’s work. What is important
to recognize with these artists is that any discussion about
a ‘return to painting’ is not simply a widening
of a pluralist context in a type of cultural free-for-all. Another
type of awareness is possible. We are locked into a reality
where abstraction is not merely the assertion of crass libertine
values and figuration is not simply the deployment of dubious
ideas of tradition and high art. The truth bound up within this
antique activity is maybe not so positive; it is a white cane
enabling us to probe a ‘blind spot’ that lays at
the heart of us.
Mick Finch, 1995.
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