Have been reading Elias Canetti, first Auto da F\u00e9, a dizzyingly grotesque novel where money and violence are in every encounter. Looking at reports of the Iran war and the continual pillaging by the current US government it seems more than appropriate. One of the things I like about Canetti so far is that he is a thinker more than an artist, but still a beautiful writer. He abhorred aestheticism & it\u2019s funny that I love French painting which has been accused of being \u201ctoo aesthetic.\u201d Contrarily I have long admired its evidence of interesting thinking as much as for its obvious elegance.<\/p>\n
Calming to be here. Springlike weather then grey northern European winter drizzle. The painter Camila Oliveira Fairclough,\u00a0a friend and an artist I have long admired, who is also an astute evaluator of contemporary painting, graciously lends me her studio & I am immediately working.1 The following week I am in Brussels overnight making a video and a public dialogue at Almine Rech with Erik Lindman,2 showing paintings selected from the past ten years paired with works by Motherwell. In preparation I read Mary Ann Caws book on him, \u201cwith Pen & Brush\u201d. I learn a lot: here there are quotes from some of his writings:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026an artist is someone who has abnormal sensitivity to a medium.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA picture is a collaboration between artist and canvas. \u2018Bad\u2019 painting is when an artist enforces his will without regard to the sensibilities of the canvas\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cit\u2019s the format, not the subject, that determines a lot in the painting\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSurrealism is above all a system for enchanting everyday life\u201d<\/p>\n
The best insight was Arthur Danto\u2019s, commenting that Motherwell\u2019s background studying 17th & 18th century philosophy brought him to art with \u201cthe necessity of setting painting at a distance and determining how it could be done.\u201d Which is what Erik and I seem to have in common & what we talk about.<\/p>\n
The exhibition, which includes two little Picasso paintings chosen by his grandson, Bernard Picasso, are as surface-oriented as the works by Erik & Robert. The idea for the exhibition originated because Erik was told by many friends & associates how his work reminded them of Motherwell more than that he was originally drawn to him. It is an interesting move, since Motherwell\u2019s contribution is still under discussion, or more accurately not discussed much as of late. The only artist we could think of who immediately acknowledged his influence was James Bishop. That was long ago.<\/p>\n
When I returned to Paris the following morning I needed to see Didier Demozay, \u201cTableaux 2000-2010\u201d 3 at Galerie Bernard Jordan before it closed. A painter I have long liked, who visited me with his wife in Brooklyn about fifteen years ago. He died last year, having spent his entire career in the south of France. Shirley Jaffe didn\u2019t understand why I liked the work so much. It was seemingly simple, large brushings of full-hued colors. Large blocks of paint on a white field. Broad strokes that he had mixed in the studio from pigments. Nervous, expressive strokes, but contained. Revisions present. Elegant, but rough, too.<\/p>\n
Generally there is a level of consideration and courtesy on the street that surpasses New York & people seem happier. And visual richness is endless. Every day some moment occurs when traversing the city that registers as pure beauty.<\/p>\n
One morning we went to the 12th arrondissement with Marielle Paul4 to see her temporary mural in the foyer of a low-income housing complex. Part of the budget of this City-of-Paris development funds a curator who makes choices of artists to decorate the lobbies for limited time periods. It was a simple image of a partially abstracted tree, a replica of the many gouache paintings that she will show at Galerie Maria Lund this coming autumn. Soon after we went to her studio, in a collection of 19th century buildings that have been artist\u2019s studios for 200 years. Her space was once occupied by Eug\u00e8ne Carri\u00e8re. As often happens when an artist finds themselves involved in a subject, the way that Marielle did when she started making semi-abstract images of trees, she discovered Paul Valery\u2019s, Dialogue de l\u2019arbre (1943). Next to it, on her desk was a copy of Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s Herbier de Prison.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Emmanuel van der Meulen\u2019s solo exhibition opens at Galerie Allen.5 I happen to have seen most of his shows for almost twenty years. He is a copain. Titled Praxis, it consists of around a dozen works on paper all about 20 x 20 centimeters, most seem to be variations on the square motifs of large square paintings he has made over the past ten years. Some geometric, others with a poured paint technique. In all cases, the past work and the present, the emphasis is on the crafting of an image at the intersection of the central or vanishing point in pictorial perspective, the focal point of the photograph, the possibilities of liquid paint and the aura of the icon. There is also the immanence of the image as well as perhaps of something sacral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Have been reading Elias Canetti, first Auto da F\u00e9, a dizzyingly grotesque novel where money and violence are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2115,9294,9293,9295,5273,5193,9297,9298,3443,378,1218,2060,159,706,9299,30,9296,9300,3404],"class_list":{"0":"post-12265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-paris","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn-art","15":"tag-brooklyn-culture","16":"tag-contemporary-art","17":"tag-culture","18":"tag-dance","19":"tag-fiction","20":"tag-film","21":"tag-music","22":"tag-new-york-art-scene","23":"tag-paris","24":"tag-phong-bui","25":"tag-poetry","26":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}