Surfaces, wonders and caprices
(excerpt, p. 165)
When, in the late 1980s, Natacha Lesueur began studies at
the
Villa Arson in Nice with the idea of becoming an artist,
she was practicing an expressionist-type painting (Egon
Schiele and Francis Bacon figured then among her references).
Her attendance at the school quickly sparked a
major break (“It was like a slap in the face,” she admitted),
which led her to change both medium and manner, to
change styles. The conditions in which this veritable upheaval
took place are worth emphasizing. It was through
an absence of knowledge, a lack of information, that she
began to focus on a discipline whose status, as she saw it,
was far from certain; it was because she did not really know
what photography and its history were that she decided to
shoot photos; in short it was based upon non-knowledge
that she set about producing images that involve know-how
in a great range of areas. And she still freely and completely
accepts this know-how today, that is, she makes it the
mainspring of the formal work itself, makes it not an “nonpower,”
a hindrance to invention, but rather the impetus of
her highly constructed images in a way. Indeed, for nearly
all of the visual fields she has opened up, Lesueur, in order
to concretely work out her artistic vision, or work out new
kinds of know-how to attain her desired formal results,
has had to learn particular techniques that have nothing
to do with the technique of photography itself. Thus, there
are compositions based on vegetables and gelatin (the
Aspics series, 1998-2000); or glazed according to the art of
chaud-froid, which involves the use of a cream-and-gelatin
bouillon (certain pieces from the 1998 series
Jambes,
Legs);
or involving the use of cold cooked meats (several
Portraits done between 1997 and 1999); or confectioners' sugar,
royal icing and chocolate (in the series on men sporting
eyeglasses in 2003, or the series on helmeted men dating
from 2004 and 2005). All of these required her to learn the
gestures culinary professionals must make, just like those that come up in the use of the pastry cone, which enabled
her to draw motifs, to form letters and attain the perfection
of rendering she was hoping to obtain. For the imprints
left on the skin (
Pressions and
Dessins pressés—
Pressed
Drawings—from 1994, 1995 and 1996), those forms of
embossing that appear very early in her work, Lesueur had
to find solutions on her own that allowed her not only to
draw such lines, but to render them lasting, just a little bit
durable. Thus Lesueur had to experience a profound stripping
away before all forms of knowledge—and, might one
legitimately deduce, before all forms of confidence and
mastery—in order to give herself the means to produce her
visual world, in order to provide herself with the resources
to do something. And that requirement to learn a skill, that
is, for invention and mastery, can go quite far, to the point
of wanting to fashion the beads herself for the production
of her first photos. The striking trial of paring down, a kind
of dispossession of all aptitude and, most probably, all
certainty too, such would be the beginning of art here, its
point of chronological and processual impetus, its trigger
event.
(...)
