If, as stated by Gilles Deleuze, painting is painting forces, what of the forces of light ? Are they at play in a painting ? And can they be captured for themselves, and isolated, leaving to emerge a pictorial fact; the pictorial fact of light. The pictorial fact of light which is to say the forces of light expressed on the canvas; it is what takes place in the painting.
If the nature of art, be it painting or music is not to invent forms, but to capture forces, one is to make visible not light itself but its effects; can this be the way to invent the pictorial fact from the capture of the forces of light. They are invisible and painting has always worked to make them visible. In the same way that there are the elemental forces : pressure, inertia, gravity, stretching, disappearance, diffusion… Colour, rhythm, composition, framing, light, and, matter are the pictorial tools available to paint those forces, and become the painted forces.
There are painters of light : Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya. They limited the use of colour and isolated they figures in chiaroscuro spaces, sculpted by games of light; things and beings tremble, appear, and, vanish under the sometimes soft, sometimes harsh tout of light. Later J. M. W. Turner will light spaces in which the world is dissolving, and a cosmic luminous force causes emergences and vanishing. With those painters, light is the central visual question : they paint light as a pictorial fact.
In the same way that Modern Art placed in the foreground the foundation of painting : colour, composition, rhythm, shape, and space, making them appear as full visual forces detached from their roles in depiction and narration, light too can be singled out as a pictorial force. Much like radiographs seem only made of light, one ought to attempt create a form of painting with canvas, brushes and acrylic to crate transparency and black and white contrasts recalling those images. This would open a way to a pictorial fact made from light and from light only.
Modern art, following J. M. W. Turner has proceeded to detach itself from classical depictions, the fundamental pictural means that were a part of it are unleashed a pure pictural facts; they are created out of a process of separation and isolation of colour, line and composition. With Matisse we see colour and line isolated, with modern abstract painters that of colour and composition are singled out, the Futurist movement will go on to focus rhythm and composition. Light too can undergo this treatment.
In “Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience” (Time and Free Will), Henri Bergson gives a definition of the object fo art and the process, worked by the artist, by which its components isolate aspects of the reality; this process is that of isolating colour, spaces, shapes, contrasts, rhythms, and, lights. “There has been for centuries men whose function has been to see and to make us see; they are the artists. Why do we say of the works of masters that they are true ? It is because we have perceived that which they show us, but only through a commonplace, pale and discoloured vision of reality. Conversely, the painter isolates a small fragment of reality and fixes on the canvas that which was seen in reality, and by thus isolating it reveals it to us what we had seen without properly seeing it.”
The process that Bergson describes is that of singling-out those aspects of reality really is what is at play on the canvas; it is the pictural fact as highlighting, putting forward, enlarging, or isolating the forces at play in reality.
The act of painting is the act of establishing a correspondence between a shape and the force that is exerted on it; but forces are not always visible and painting is about making them visible, painting is about making the effect of the force seen, that is to say to show the deformation of the shape resulting of that force. Those forces that can apply themselves on the shape can be thought of in two types; one that acts externally acting on the shape (says the way contours dissolve in Monet’s paintings, or how forms under light disappear with J. M. W. Turner) and one that acts from the inside of the shape, transforming and transcending it (say the fullness that radiates from Cezanne’s apples). Sometimes, like in Van Gogh’s paintings, both forces are at play together; all the small brush lines give the impression to both deform the shape and yet seem to emanate from the shape itself. Painting is about the capturing of what is never fully captured, because it is about capturing that in the shape that has no shape, is of the shape but goes beyond the shape.
This raises the question as to how to represent the deformation produced from the capture of the figure or forme in the space it occupies, and the light that shines on it. If the Forde is to captured by light, it follows that the shapes and figures are being deformed and distorted under its effect, and it is that deformation itself is what makes the lights and shadows of the shapes visible; this process thus makes them ambiguous. A process of dampening or diffusion is at play, shape, and figure blur with the background, starting to disappear in the low light and being reaffirmed in the highlights of the scene. Light sharpens and the shadows blur, shapes are being distorted and merge into the foreground. Particles of light can be seen to grow, shrink, and transform; variations in light and texture come to represent the changes of time, shape and background come to warp together : one over the other, one against the other.
In the manner of radiographs, my technique works on transparency, I use neither white nor grey; the shades of black and grey are obtained through the transparency of the black acrylic paint, and the canvas shows through in the lighter areas of the painting. There are no impasto, the texture of the canvas itself creates a sense of light by removing matter as much as possible to the benefit of transparency.
Light is isolated and become, thus extracted, an absolute visual force in the most literal sense of the word which is, I believe, what the masters of the painting of light would painted.
But light is not solely a static force putting the shapes into space but also that which puts them in movement. In the black and white spaces of my paintings, light and the shadows it creates hit, dissolve and envelop the figures and subject. Light is then revealed as a force in motion in which all elements of the painting are caught, left to deform under the effect of light in motion.
The pictorial force has always defined a space in two dimensions making motion, and thus time made a vanishing point by the impossibility of its representation. To represent time is an paradox that is radical yet fundamental to the nature of painting. The idea of light in motion forces into the subject the perception of change and motion exerted on all beings : time. Figures as they become are immersed in a world of light in the relationship between subject and background creates their motion, their change, their becoming. Space is thus scattered as fragments, almost atoms of light, reconstructing space in their movements and groupings.
My paintings and their very classical compositions borrow from the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Watteau and allude directly to the works of the masters in their relationship to light and its relationship to motion. Regardless if it ties together different elements in the frame, or if it scatters them, light is always tied to motion : sometimes the background is put in motion; sometimes it is the figure that starts moving. Light becomes, at the same time, colour, composition, and, rhythm of my canvases.
All my work on highlights and shadows presents the pictorial figure as the locus in which the tension between matter is at play; painting, even more so figure painting, has always been of all the art that in which this tension finds its purest expression. It is in this context that reality is to be understood as the meeting of matter and spirit, in and of the figure.
Thus as matter is spiritualised as the spirited is incarnated, the figures in my paintings can be thought of as being of light walking the line between matter and spirit, as it has often been represented in many attempts to represent light, but this time through the figure caught in the motion induced by light. Light is sometimes diffused from one shape to another or sharply projected, thus fixing the illuminated shape into space. Conversely, the blur of the figure represents the vanishing of the forms, vanishing of matter into spirit.
My work attempts to include both a search for a contemporary mode of figurative representation and a return to classical painting. This return to classical painting is done through figure painting : “The figure is the sensible form when taken back to sensation”, Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon : Logic of Sensation.
I believe that, as it is used and seen repeatedly, art sometimes loose some of its true meaning, this implies that it is often desirable to go back to the roots of an art form rather than to embrace traditions established by dominant institutions. Painting is to reinvent itself by looking back to its roots thus reestablishing itself anew, rediscovering its elementary forces. Those roots encompass the forces of colour, that of composition and, for me, the forces of light in motion. It is my belief that in the way, painting can escape the long established dichotomy between depiction and presentation and formulate a real pictoriality, challenging painting-as-images. Figure painting is not just what it depicts and goes beyond the simple crafting of images, and is tied to a pictural fact. Painting needs to separates itself from the simple enticement of images and thus be free of the constraints of depiction, narration or illustration; such images are flat and intrinsically literal, nothing goes beyond the form.
With the figure and now with light, the shape is taken back to the sensation, which is to say the opposite of the shape taken back to that object it is to represent. A pictorial fact in a painting is to clear away the presences incurred by representation, which is something that no pure image could ever do as nothing can escape from a pure image. With a painting, the shape is to express more than just the shape and thus to go beyond the mere visible. This leaves us with an ultimate question : if painting is to find all its strengths against pure images, what is it that classical achieves that pure images cannot ? To paraphrase Rene Magritte, painting is related with that which is mysterious, and with the mystery within reality. It exists as a sacred presence within what is profane, as explained by Henri Bergson, it sacralises the world by revealing its reality. It only remains to understand how this happens. The question addresses a deep mystery; indeed why is there so much that is sacred in Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Turner, Bacon or Lucian Freud, and yet it is so deeply anchored in reality ? Beyond their near-absolute technical mastery, the nature of their work speaks to a mystery, with the paradox of this sacrality is that of reality itself, a furtive reality which you perceive rarely and which is the very substance of art. As Delacroix wrote in his diary :”Painting is about saying again what has once been said once again, but to say it once more differently.”
Emmanuelle Laurens 