Fanny Drugeon, March 2015
Travels in time
“L’espace est un doute : il me faut sans cesse le marquer, le désigner”
(Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces)
First encounters with the paintings of Frédéric Prat at the Mudam, 2008, “Above all, colour!” passing on to the misleadingly static leeks which were already taunting colour to explosion point even in their titles. Then, “The detours of abstraction”, 2012, and what detours, what shifts since the pioneers of abstraction!
“Regardless of its form”, this precision in the definition of colour, seen as the “nature of a light, the surface of an object”1. resonates in the paintings of Frédéric Prat. At a quick glance they risk being associated with a strictly formal practice. Yet a more attentive look removes any attempt at formalist association. A direct confrontation with a painting a priori immobile where the imprint of the different strata is not immediately perceptible.
The territories of experimentation open up and the question of abstraction recoils, just as it did at the end of the 1950’s for artists like Robert Ryman, Frank Stella or Ad Reinhardt. Ryman re-opens the questions linked with abstract art, convinced that what is important is not the subject but the manner of painting. Reinhardt confirms this view and says: “It is harder to talk orally or in writing about abstract painting than about any other, in that its content cannot be found in a subject [subject matter], or a story, but in the activity of painting itself “2. It is precisely this activity, the fact of painting, which is at the heart of Frédéric Prat’s approach. No sentimentalism but an encounter with painting that goes beyond the subject, even if it is abstract.
However, while the legacies are many, there is no nostalgia here, just the pursuit of a colour that is not fixed, which evolves with each series, and not the repeat of a formal history. The picture is composed progressively, temporality is integrated into the working process of Frédéric Prat. Yet there is no feeling of laborious effort, which recalls what Matisse wrote to Henry Clifford in February 1948, about the exhibition Clifford was preparing for him in Philadelphia: “I’ve always tried to conceal my efforts, I’ve always wanted my works to have the lightness and joy of springtime which never lets all the hard work be felt.” Exactly what the artist is seeking, despite the need to draw his brush again and again over the canvas, adding matter, colours. All these components that Frédéric Prat sees in painting, like his view of the old masters’ painting, where the physical approach leads him to observe “the articulation of paint by each painter: Franz Hals, Tintoretto, Titian, Caravaggio, El Greco” 3.
Work over the long term is essential, composed of several moments in time: the “colours” of 2007 for example or the recent Whites. The whole is associated with a “flux” like a vital flux. “Monochrome” is how Frédéric Prat designates a part of the picture, the part designed to receive colour like Rose (2007), the background, we could have written, but we are not concerned here with substance and form. “The background colour determines the surface, sets up the terrain, establishes the place, prepares what follows”, the artist explains. The chromatic choreography can now begin, but the monochrome has its full role to play, as dynamic as the colours that are thickly juxtaposed, the various actions take their place. Looking at Blue (2012) for example, the colours coat us, the monochrome reaches its limit, like a standard ready to be infringed, it perturbs the other colours and is perturbed by them. But what exactly are these colours but the presence of the artist, his physical engagement and his choices, clear and free? It’s a question of forms which are not forms, or become forms progressively, but which before were above all colour. Jonathan Lasker speaks of his canvases as « abstract images ». The mobility of the viewer’s eye is called into play, it is invited both to move and to remain static for a time.
Colours going free, weightless. Pink, Yellow, Black. …Colour is omnipresent, a signifying element, but it also designates the picture by the “monochrome” intermediary chosen by the artist for each canvas. “I want my paintings to defy any naming process and to produce language, so they must not embody anything nameable” 4.
The means of expression evolve; drawing, initially abandoned as a rejection of constrained, preconceived composition, now returns. And with it, a new way of distributing colours, a return to working on a blank canvas and a greater density of colours/actions (White, 2014) which will sometimes go as far as to take the place of the background. The transition to the Whites (2014-2015), from paper to canvas, results in the freeing of the monochrome principle as Frédéric Prat had elaborated it. The operating mode is never fixed. More colours make their appearance or are distributed differently.
Painting both material and immaterial, visible and invisible, as Merleau-Ponty put it. “In exhibiting my works I want to determine a space for thought”, Frédéric Prat explains, a space for thought, but also a space for thinking the act of painting”. The meaning of painting exists only in the relationship between the viewer and the painter 5.”, declared Günter Umberg. In the end, so many travels in time, the time of the painting, of the artist, and of ourselves.
1. Le nouveau petit Robert : dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, 1996.
2. Ad Reinhardt, « Abstraction and illustration », an unpublished lecture, 1943, in Cahiers du Mnam, n° 49, Autumn 1994, p. 81-83.
3. An exchange with the artist, 31 March 2015.
4. Idem.
5. Joseph Marioni, Günter Umberg, Outside the cartouche – Zur Frage des Betrachters in der radicalen Malerei, Munich, Neue Kunst Verlag, 1986, quoted by Christian Besson, « Abstraction faite du spectateur: absorption, réjection, fascination distraction », in Tableaux territoires actuels, 1997, Quimper, Le Quartier, p. 78.