Primary Spark

Exhibition 20 April - 13 July 2023

With a selection of works by :

Martin BARRÉ / Jean-Charles BLAIS / CORNEILLE / Olivier DEBRÉ / Bernard FRIZE / Hans HARTUNG / Toshimitsu IMAÏ / Mimmo ROTELLA / Chiharu SHIOTA / TAKIS / Chu TEH-CHUN / Zao WOU-KI

Referring to Zao Wou-Ki’s painting in 1975, René Char, in his text le dos houleux du miroir wrote: “colour is found there like a ragged scout, almost a semi-nomad”. This is how he captured the flash with which, moving ahead of itself and the composition, it escapes from all submission to the figurative, springs, sparks, or parcels itself in a tumult of light that is nevertheless always structured.

You could be tempted to play with words and to summon, beyond the imagery of the checkerboard, and of construction with coloured blocks to which the adjective chosen by the poet refers, that of laceration, of the “jagged”, sharpness, slicing, the precision of the gesture of painting (and calligraphy) through which the lines spread out and organise on the surface of Zao Wou-Ki’s works, and the other artists brought together here. They seem to have been captured in a form of urgency, of necessity to pick up speed with the form given life by their tracing. For Hartung it is a bolt of lightning, as already in his school copybooks, he had tried to “catch them in flight [… as soon as they appeared” to “trace their zigzagging on the page before the thunderclaps” (Self-portrait, 1976).

The works presented in this exhibition are all imbued with this feeling for speed, by visceral spontaneity which is sometimes nameless (such as Bernard Frize, Mimmo Rotella) and yet absolutely unique, with a line or a brushstroke (or tear) that streaks, incises or even pulverises, and so rethinks space. The space of a painting like that of the wall surrounding it. Because what asserts itself is also the skill in being freed from the frame, in lushly interpreting – in the vigour of Toshimitsu Imai’s splashes and Bernard Frize’s minimalist systematism, or the restraint of Jean-Charles Blais’s ink drawings – the momentum and fullness of the material carried away by the creative gesture.

An implacable spire-crack digs the monochrome expanse for Martin Barré while the chromatic effusions of Chu The-Chun deny the flatness of their support. For Olivier Debré, a rectangle measuring 12cm by 22 is enough to create a little self-sufficient world without any mimetic references, which pours out in precious shards of green, red, blue, and brown. The eye settles into these coloured shades, invited to lose itself there with as much force as in the monumental paintings that abstraction sometimes requires. The miracle of a lyrical gust that is incarnated in modest forms like in Hans Hartung’s delicate energy, or in the discreet but very real tension of the red threads with which Chiharu Shiota tacks his drawings, stitches that injure less than they structure and animate the paper’s white surface.

A miracle? Is this not the word used by Zao Wou-Ki’s great friend, “when above the abyss that separates/ Shines the star of the primary spark. (Le livre du vide médian, 2004) A flicker that aptly illuminates the abyss, the night from which emerges, in Corneille’s Notagamiras, a network of filaments and of diffracted pink and blue gemstones – almost a jewel ! Unless a tribal face can be imagined in the organic bursting of shapes at work on the canvas? At the limit of the figurative, this apparition perpetuates, in the vibration of colours served by the raw confidence of the brushstrokes and incisions, the incandescence of a composition, the decorative influence does not dull the abstract composition.

Alix Agret - Art historian

Translated by Jane MacAvock