Interview (November 1999)

Emmanuelle Chérel and François Daireaux

Before your came for the residency, you sent us a text that did not clearly define your project as it suggested different areas of research, and which expressed the will to work according to the propositions of the other invited artists. I quote you: "It is while establishing a dialogue that I could push and interrogate my work". In your arrival here you succeeded a complete research phase in the course of which you did not wish to speak about your work. Finally, during this period, did you probe your questioning; did you discuss the other guest artist’s propositions?

My biggest question was bound to my project. I waited for a long time to work within the Pavillon des Sources or in the art Centre. It was not evident to make a work in front of the Michel Guillet’s wall installation. Michel Guillet having defined his project exactly for this situation, I wondered what I was going to be able to make in front of this wall. Now that the opposition exists, it seems to me a little disturbing and the cohabitation is not evident. My work asks to be placed in the twilight.

Your work ‘Vert de Terre’ consists of fifty-six elements made from thermofusible glue, injected in pre-dug blocks of green floral moss. These elements were arranged on the surface of a cyma. In the gallery entrance, before discovering the set that I have just described, the viewer finds himself in front of five photos, five images of five elements slightly blown up. What is interesting is that these elements had already been used in a previous work...

It is an operating mode that I elaborated for an installation in the municipal Gallery Edouard Manet, GennevilJiers in January ‘99. It consisted of eight hundred modules, twenty times as small as those whom I present here. These aligned on the ground, defined a perimeter, which we could cross. My work is often based on the fine-tuning of a module, which while repeating itself, changes shape and colour. It is never completely the same element. The contrast and the repetition are recurring concerns in my work. The twice-enlarged modules of Pougues-les-Eaux emphasize its monumental aspect. They are installed in a frieze and recall the notion of pattern.

These modules have an organic shape, biomorphic...

My current work is very organic and filled by a whole mechanical implementation.

These modules, these unities, were put along the wall’s surface; therefore the viewers are confronted with this surface. This work seems to oscillate between the sculpture and painting. Are the undulations between sculpture and painting, as well as the gliding from one to another, part of your concern?

It is a matter that interests me greatly. I define myself as sculptor, even though the wall is realised by painters. I work on the product and the materials regularly, nevertheless, I constantly have the impression to aim towards the dematerialization. For instance, I choose the sculpture and at the same time, I do not want to construct the sculpture. One of my problems is to go towards a materiality often related to classical sculpture. When I attach these elements to a wall, when I hang them, I deny their dimension, their volume and their weight. I treat them as shades of painting. A direct relationship with earth is implied as each element is an individual unit. When I create a sculpture, I try to reverse the work with the aim to represent it as a painter’s work. It is a way of upsetting the balance of the elements.

What is the significance of the conflict against materialism?

It is the contradiction that I question.

You use the wall surface in the same way as a number of 20th century painters - I think of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or even Niele Toroni, we could also to find some others- for instance that the painting was handled as surface, filled in a homogeneous way, without hierarchy nor depth. Your elements leave empty spaces on the cyma, but nevertheless invade its whole. How were they arranged?

They are placed in a more or less unpredictable way to cover in a homogeneous manner all the surface of the wall. It is the occupation of a wall surface with a desire of balance and a good distribution of the masses.

Why did you choose floral moss? What kind of aesthetic were you looking for? Was it for its colour?

The painting is presented in the material and its colour. The green colour, it is not what defines it; it is given by the floral moss that I use. For a previous work, I contacted two hosiery makers and they gave me their 1995 collections, it was then these who defined the colours used. In this way we can imagine the making of a new work following the same process but using the 1999 collection. The work would certainly have had very different colours. Colours change according to modes; they evolve, and degrade in time.
I have observed in shops, in the floral decoration section - I often find my materials in shopping centres - that the floral moss is a material that discolours in the daylight. It is an unstable colour and its fragility is a quality that interests me. It is enough to put the finger on it to mark it. It records the slightest scratch. It is like a sponge. I like the unstable, changeable materials that move in time, and require some care and ability. They are materials with which I can illustrate stories.

It seems to me that you are also interested in the function and meaning of this material...

Materials are never used purely for their aesthetics. The fact that moss, soaking with water, preserves f1owers for arrangements stimulates my imagination. It makes me think about preservation of things that die, that degrade and disappear. These notions worry me a lot. The gloomy aspect in my work is also important. In my work there is always a presence of flowers, and a notion of immortality. I pricked a stick instead of pricking f1owers.

All this eventually creates a story; it is materialistic support as well as symbolic. However, everything remains understood. The public does not necessarily have to have this information to appreciate my work. I do not want to make my techniques obvious.

You thus think that in art today things are often too simplified and expressed too clearly?

Certain artists say: " I make it because I want to say this and that ". They show and explain the instructions. They leave no freedom to the viewer. The sense is rapidly exhausted. It is a rather scholarly process. It can work in certain cases but not for all. As for myself, if the viewer looks at my work only for its formal aspect, they miss my intentions. The work of the green moss brings questions that are beyond its aesthetic. The fact of pricking mechanically a stick in one block of moss reminds me of Simon Hantaï. It is a work of blind.

You used the word mechanical to qualify your process of production and the fact that your modules are realize from an automatic and repeated movement. There is a kind of anonymity in the execution of the work. When you prick the moss, do you not ever try to anticipate the shape?

No, not really, I prick a stick in a block, I dig, I empty, and I make some space. I know that you should not exceed a limit. My movement is very mechanical and meditative. I print, and I record. There is a big detachment in this process. When I pour the glue in high temperature, I let materials work between them, I know that there is an inner works that I cannot master. I observe. I appreciate this detachment. The obtained module is a recording, a crystallisation.

After having spoken about the sculpture in pictorial terms, you now use photographic notions. Impression and recording, this evokes the idea of tracks, imprints, "to have been there", clues, and an index. You speak about symbolic movement but are you not interested by the direct imposition of things, by anything of sub or pre-symbolic?

The modules are practically in a homologue photographic format; they are motionless moments. The dimension of time is very important in this work. In its mode of creation my sculptures are like traps that I cannot reverse. When I prick, everything is registered. When I speak about photosensitive plate and print, one cannot avoid thinking of the memory. Finally, everything is recorded in an irreparable manner.

The arrangement of modules and their forms create tensions. The forms, due to their strangeness, arouse sensations... They seem clear, natural, but at the same time disturbing, situated between the unknown, the unspeakable and the familiar. The viewer seems to me to be in a situation to perceive quite contradictory emotions.

These forms are surfaces of projection, receptacles so that people can project their fantasies, their vision, and their imprints. They are photosensitive plates, as well as a cliché.

The colour is cold and ambiguous neither natural nor artificial...

It is an indefinable colour, greenish. This greenish dressing reminds of camouflage. Sometimes, the organic side of these works disturbs me. Is it not a work made to be disturbing? And if we are not disturbed by our own work, who can we disturb?

What intrigues me is that your work, in spite of its organic aspect, possesses a few aspects of minimal work: the idea of the artist withdrawal, the notion of reproduction, of serialisation, of repetition, the criticism of the illusionist pictorial space, the criticism of the Euclidian space... Naturally your comment is totally different, your forms are not industrious and you not only interest yourself with the phenomenology.

All that I make is homemade. I use industrial materials, but I make the work myself. In contemporary art it is not very common to see artists working manually and it is strongly critical, it can appear like an old ‘fuddy-duddy’. Today, artists often realise their thoughts by the use of others. I am not against these kinds of things but it disturbs me when it becomes a dogma, and when the artist refrains from making, as if the manipulation and the transformation of the materials were taboo. It is important to transform, to be in contact with materials, I need it. Maybe that will change. When I do photography, I sometimes feel a kind of frustration. There is such a distance with the material and the subject that I feel there is a hole that is in need of filling.
During the creation of the work, I wait for accidents or unexpected things, things that are going to have consequences on my reflection, on my thought. I wait for them. It brings me to things that I would not have been able to reach otherwise. I like this way of progressing ... It is true that sometimes I make a little bit of science fiction, there are universes in my work which are attached to strange, supernatural and mutant forms but at the same time it is very controlled, everything is calibrated, it is not a thing that is estimated in a anarchic way, there is order. This last work is very orderly.

To return to the repetition, it is a way of questioning the image and the multiple, for instance, there are preoccupations of the story of the sculpture.

In spite of its development along the wall, your work seeks the viewer’s body and seems to surround it. Would you call it "landscape"?

Often, I realise installations are of important dimensions so that the public find themselves physically involved. To allow the viewer to enter my work is an important dimension. It corresponds to the illusion of crossing a space or a landscape and not knowing if we are situated within the inside - or if we are simply outside- in what takes place. It is also to cross the painting space. My work consists of creating images that, at some point, the viewer finds, himself, wrapped within it.

More concisely, how is the Pougues-les-Eaux work involving the public? You place the viewer in an ambiguous position. They are unable to observe the object and its photographic representation at the same time.
They always find themselves between both representation and physical experience that does not evacuate the material or the tactility...

When the public enter the le Centre d’art, they are confronted at first with the five images. Then, they leave behind these images to discover the wall with fifty-six sculptures. Then they face the real. The relationship in the photographic representation of the sculpture- double its size- and the original sculpture are obviously very different. The photographic image is already an interpretation. Some people will prefer the image of the sculpture to the real sculpture, the image as a ‘thing’. The photographic medium evokes the loss, the passage as total different presence. The whole comes in two parts. A notion of space-time is established in this movement. It tried to rewind like in films. This filmic notion seems to me important for this work. The work shown at Gennevilliers was also little, similar to the reel of a film, although it is not have the twenty-four frames per second.

In your work there is something undefined, that escapes, that we cannot classify, the tracks are crossed and blurred...

It is something that I maintain even in my speech. If everything is said, I do not see the point. I look for a kind of freedom. I want my work to remain opened, and then it is possible for it to take different directions.