The Painting and the Gorgon by Ali Soltani A reading onto the
work of Francine LeClercq.
More
often than not, a work is subject to a mechanical conspiracy between
its maker and the recipients, which conceals its truth. The more facts
are volunteered, the more accessible the work is made to be, the more
transparent the intent of the maker,..., in short, the more authority
exerted over the work, the more repetitive are the nods of affirmation.
Indeed, the use value of meaning would be reduced to null were it
not for the dynamic automata of this hiccup, the transaction by which
the two integers, the author on the one hand and the nodding heads
on the other happily interact to forge meaning.
In
this regard, perhaps due to a certain dimness in Francine LeClercq1s
work, whether in the morphological images of the drawn works, the
catalytic drips of the meshworks of late 901s, or most recently the
crepuscular glaze of the poured works, the striking aspect, is first
and foremost, the almost primitive urge to smear the surface, as if
under the burden of some guilt, one is hastily compelled to bury all
proof, erasing the trace of anything by which the slightest meaning
could be discerned, rendering it insignificant.
The
force of contradiction in this assertion is however too great, guilt
is made significant only when it is tied to a value system, the behavioural
code, the convention of meaning, the most devoted agent of which,
language, in its highly evolved script form, is itself a by-product
of the same archaic impulse of smearing, marking, painting. To speak
metaphorically, there has always existed a curious relationship between
a thing marked and what it re-presents, a hide and seek between meaning
and the truth it reflects; that in the verb reflect: to express a
thought resulting from reflection, there is inherent the highly reflective
nature of a truth itself, the very quality that allows it to be camouflaged
the instant a glance is cast on it, depicting everything but itself,
blind to sight; and yet, if its presence is felt, it isn1t that by
virtue of its absence, it has traditionally been summoned as a myth,
something higher than it may be, but that the stuff of reason, the
systems of representation, if they are to be utilized, are offered
no other ground, no other choice but to be pulled into its gravitational
force; but alas without friction, so that the moment they begin to
exert their weight, they slip, and it is in this slippage that the
sought thing might ever so dimly present itself.
And
it is at such a moment that in the syntax, latent in Francine1s paintings,
in the sometimes evident pain taken to produce meaning out of the
relationships and articulation of parts, at once random and organized,
divisible and whole, that we find the language, contrary to all expectations,
has instead taken leave of its communicative powers, resigned to a
mucus like outpouring of a delirium as oblivious to discourse as Dali1s
melting clock to time. Nowhere is this state of flux more present
than the strong sense of evacuation one gets from the catalytic works
where the drips of paint on the edge of the canvas seem to be moving
away in gradual motion, having left as it were, a geological trace
on the surface, or equally the sense of expulsion through the incisions
made on the canvas, the paint suspended in a seemingly perpetual viscid
state.
In
comparison with the new works, whereas the same kind of attention
to the parts is still operative, in the presence of more variables,
the inflection on syntax in all articulateness has had the paradoxical
effect that the language is made even more impotent, divested of any
claim to self referentiality. Notably, while the centrifugal dispersion
in the catalytic works, as in Marcel Duchamp1s Rotoreliefs, does this
by having the unsettling effect of never arriving to a static moment
for the eye to rest on, the semi mirror like quality of the current
works preys on the eccentricity of the viewer, we find ourselves suddenly
ingested, looking out from the gut of the painting, seeing nothing
else but what it sees, only then to be expelled from it, akin to the
whale1s nausea that vomited Jonah back to the shore. This perhaps
is one of the most compelling aspects of the work, the diffusion of
visual register in viewing the work to a powerful awareness of being
in the presence of a work. Furthermore this presence is itself thrown
to a backdrop of a larger whole in the clear reference made to hanging,
which we see in the protrusion of nails, in the displacement of the
painted area within the stretcher, or in the syncopated designations
etched onto the surface. As a whole, a clear attempt is made to inverse
the negativity of the wall as a mere hanging surface to take an ontological
role in the positive survey of the field proper, without the illusionistic
pictorializations of a tromp l1oeil.
Another
peculiarity is the reference made to certain works in history, delineated,
captioned to indicate the artist, date, size of painting, etc., as
if the work has been turned to a catalogue, an essay on painting,
and yet at the very moment of enquiry, we find that the words are
too buried under the paint to be legible, their semantic function
made defunct; the title, un-titled given to the paintings therefore,
finds a particular resonance in that, more than just a cautionary
stance to avoid to project meaning into the work, it enunciates the
very action by which the painting deflates any meaning that could
be read into it, a kind of shield that throws the petrifying gaze
cast on it back to its viewer.
Francine
LeClercq - Paintings. SOHO20 Gallery : September 2-27, 2003.
The
artist will be present at the opening, on Friday September 5th, from
6:00 to 8:00 PM.
