Plein jour

Julien Fronsacq, A Paradoxical Pictorial Flatness


In the screens/paintings series, Cécile Bart uses a “broad daylight” Tergal veil as the surface for the paint. She “loads” the warp with paint then, quite often, “clears it out” to obtain an impregnated and see-through (1) screen to the space roundabout. We are acquainted with the self-referential dogma prescribing a specification of art disciplines. A reflective painting must reveal the flatness of its surface, one of the component parts of the pictorial medium. (2) In this respect, the admittedly preparatory application that Cécile Bart conveys to the surface is striking because it seems so paradoxical. In the wake of Stella, Fontana and Toroni, among others, Cécile Bart renders the autonomous utterance splendidly contradictory. During her apprenticeship, she was reproached for this retrieval. By those referring to the aesthetics of Supports-Surfaces, (3) but her eye was more on American painting, keen as she was to be like artists as different as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt—and more remote works, but works whose polarities, as represented by these latter, it was her aim to go beyond. This surface-related paradox in Cécile Bart's oeuvre becomes resolved if we take a look at the European origins of abstract painting.

In this respect, it is amusing that Cécile Bart's early experiments, when she was still a student, (4) were largely inspired by a Matisse picture with the oxymoron-like title Le Silence habité des maisons. (5) In the middle a window gives onto a verdant garden; inside in the foreground two figures at a table are depicted schematically as if back-lit. In the background, sideways on to the widow, with a more marked contrast, the curtains and the chest of drawers are black highlighted by a white drawing. At the heart of the student's various experiments and experiences, there was the use of the object on top of the chest of drawers in its original drawing, white on a black ground. Among the different installations, the white drawing is either projected onto black screens with the help of a slide projector, or painted white on a transparent screen, or else rendered material as a sculpture. In these different states, Cécile Bart extends Matisse's reversal, but the white of the light and the paint alter the transparency of the screens. Her first exhibition of screens/paintings gave structure to this paradox, this time in a reverse way. Among of these screens, two linear geometric black constructions give precision to the blur of the unpainted cloth drawn tight over the stretcher in the middle of the space. (6) Later, when she extended the use of black to the entire surface, this time monochrome, she was still opposed to the modern dogma of autonomy. (7)

Cécile Bart's work is in a dynamic relationship with the space around it like a physical object inviting the viewer to a time-related experience. Eric de Chassey has taken a close look at the challenges of a linkage between Bart's works and Matisse's. (8) The picture she has appropriated proceeds “from a contradictory project of nondifferentiation between pictorial space and real space. Beyond this particular picture, it is thus the legacy of this “aesthetics of distraction”. So Matisse's La Danse, which is part of the Barnes Foundation collection (9) is the achievement of painting in scale with the environment, where the series of “windows” is the premiss. The manhandling of classical perspective and its re-establishment as a plane is, with Matisse, an attempt to capture the space beyond the picture. In her work as a whole, Cécile Bart simultaneously holds on to the contradictory terms of Matisse's operation: pictorial plane and real space. The reproductions of the very beautiful installation at Isabelle Suret's gallery explains this link, even anecdotally. In a private mansion, a series of coloured cloths are backed on old-style wallpaper depicting a very 18th century exotic landscape. This series marries the decorative and the eye's snare. The cloth, head on, is translucid, showing glimpses of a landscape, and laterally opaque, turning into a coloured plane. The same goes for the screens/paintings. The paint is an opaque plane when its situation as an object in space is evident. In the simultaneity of these opposing forces, the use of metal stretchers clearly shows an interest in the material aspect and it suffices to undergo the experience of the screens/paintings to realize that the principle of colour distribution in the atmosphere is not happening.

Bonnard also shed light on this aesthetics of distraction. It was perhaps with his Nabi apprenticeship (bright colours in unmodulated flat tints) that the painter became aware of the tension of the depth of the space depicted and the flatness of the canvas. (10) In many Bonnard works, the eye is attracted to the centre before becoming intrigued by the details at the sides. The picture is by turns a trap then an outward foil. (11) The hypothetical return to Impressionism definitely facilitated this “double requirement” that issues from an interest in theories of perception. By encouraging sensations with raw impressions, Bonnard was familiar with optico-physiological principles. (12) Perception is no longer a mere retinal recording of impressions of nature. It is prolonged by the cerebral production of sensations. Physiological optics (13) invites painters to translate their sensations like so many coded signs—coded by the neuro-optico-cerebral system of a now incorporated world. There is a veritable continuum from the space perceived to the space painted. Bonnard reinstated the perspective of the pictorial space as a plane to be entered.

The frame is usually seen as an indexation tool. This is certainly not so with Cécile Bart. Her passionate interest in film should not throw us off the scent. The frame here is less the space of fiction than the frame devised in a reflective way since “The New Wave” (14). As used in the screens/paintings series, it is subordinate to the changing cloth. So the indexation itself is changing, in relation to the viewer's movements in the space. (15) The optico-physiological legacy redefines the artist's subjectivity. With the spatial continuum, the artist belongs to the same space as the onlooker. They are fairly subordinate to their mixed sensations of the world. With the screens/paintings, Cécile Bart is not handing us the keys for understanding the exhibition space, but rather arranging dynamic obstacles.

As we have already seen, Cécile Bart began her artwork by appropriating a detail from Matisse, who might be a mirror. This latter, treated as negative, is a black surface. Beyond being a mere quotation, Cécile Bart used for her own purposes this paradoxical reflection which she has since been developing in her work. As in some Bonnard pictures, the mirror is a strange object that focuses the eye while reflecting space. The literal use of the mirror in the 1960s extended its relativity, not to say its ambivalence. With Mirror Vortex, Smithson turned the mirror into a kaleidoscope. The reflecting surface is an instrument of paradoxical inclusion of the work in space, absorbing both space and gaze as if a black hole. (16) Whatever the devices applied in space by Larry Bell, the changing mirror activates space by upsetting one's perception of the elementary forms of sculpture and real spatial landmarks. In Dan Graham's arrangements, the mirror works like the performer in Performer /Audience Sequence (1975), offering a heightened reflection to the point where the informative “feedback” is an on-going loop. This feedback produces a Larsen (17) which disorients the viewer, blurs his physiological points of reference, and rouses him from his lethargy. Dan Graham chose for the cover of one his publications (18) a very famous illustration by Ernest Mach, which explains the physical inclusion of the body in the observation space and hence the incorporation of perception: “the contrast between the Ego and the world, between perception or phenomenon and the thing vanishes”. Like so many indexes, the screens/paintings that Cécile Bart leaves indeterminate invite the viewer to criss-cross the space, and walk around it not like authoritarian frames and indexes, but more like the instigators of a dynamic confusion. In tandem with an artistic subjectivity dependent on physiological optics, and rid of absolutist and Cartesian obligations, the viewer of the “Bartian space” is endowed with a gaze distracted by the environment in which all his senses are invested.


Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods