On a picture’s possibility
Fred Gusda, 2018
“I started by learning to draw, to speak with a stroke, to indicate, transcribe, modify. The first time I stood with my brushes in front of a stretched canvas I was faced with the question of whether there was a need for drawing in this specific space. And if so, what drawing, what forms, why?”1.
Most of what follows proceeds from this inaugural declaration by Frédéric Prat, and from the question it raises once again as to how to read what one sees, given that if no picture exists the question becomes redundant. Yet strictly speaking, it is the very absence of a picture that implies that the question should be asked. But first we must be careful not to confuse these two absences that have absolutely nothing in common. The first, the absence of any picture, is nothing: the mere non-existence of picture or pictures of any kind for someone looking for something else. The absence of a picture, on the other hand, mainly concerns those who are looking for it, and is the equivalent of a presence: the presence of a vacuum, which can only be comprehensible in terms of the possibility (or impossibility) of filling it, through the appeal exerted by this (im)possibility, and through the attempt that follows.
On June 12, 1671, Philippe de Champaigne spoke before the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The subject of his lecture was a painting by Titian: Virgin, Child Jesus and St. John the Baptist 2. This lecture, through the positions it defends, is considered to be the starting point for the famous “colours dispute” in which the conflicting sides can be summed up (rather caricaturally) as follows: on the one hand the partisans of drawing, and on the other the partisans of colour; Charles le Brun on the left (“the prerogative of colour is to satisfy the eye, whereas drawing satisfies the mind”) 3. Roger de Piles on the right (first the Painter sketches his subject by means of drawing, and then finishes it by means of colour, which by dispensing what is true on drawn objects also dispenses the perfection that Painting is capable of)” 4. cerebralists versus sensualists; Poussinists versus Rubenists; Ingres versus Delacroix; in short, Ancients versus Moderns.
If we read again the words of the artist, first those that coincide with the inaugural phase of his works: “the first time I stood with my brushes in front of a stretched canvas I was faced with the question of whether there was a need for drawing in this specific space”, then more recently, words that announce that “drawing - in the sense of sketching or preparing a form - is voluntarily excluded from his work, whereas colour and matter occupy a central place” 5. One could think that Frédéric Prat’s pictures replay and perpetuate, in their way, this age-old tradition, by simply doing a volte-face in the interval of a few years. This is not the case.
For drawing and painting are here one and the same thing, the thing itself: the picture. And the picture is precisely the place where this distinction is effaced, if it ever did exist. We should take Frédéric Prat literally: the drawing that is excluded from his work is that which would consist of “preparing a form”, that is to say, not drawing, but making drawing a preparatory tool for something else, something that would serve to represent, to present in its place, and which, once its mission is accomplished, would disappear as a drawing. The “need for drawing” is the need for its strictest and fullest reality. A reality that prohibits working as if one could forget that a form, whatever it may be, at the same time offers itself as colour, and also matter. Not that they accompany it as if they could be separated, as if the form had finally acquired them accidentally and after the fact. What is accidental and after the fact is precisely our ability to distinguish them (or even worse, our inability not to distinguish them).
That being said, now to the heart of the matter, which is: “to present painting in the most evident way possible, so that each person has the feeling of momentarily seeing it like that, without ever having done so”. A seemingly strange proposal that seems like not talking about pictures or painting except in periphrases, which are evident and therefore useless. No doubt. Provided that one understands that periphrase, for the person describing pictures, or for the artist himself, is not just the only serious discursive model but also the only one possible. The periphrase has the courtesy to admit that it neither wishes or has the ability to speak for the picture, which shows itself directly. This is why, for Frédéric Prat, it is a question of “showing painting in the most evident way possible”. But how to understand a project of this kind? Very precisely, as the opposite of a project, that is to say: not as the realisation of a possible picture among others, the more-or-less calculated arrangement of an existing repertoire of shapes, colours, available backgrounds, well-practised gestures or their expected results, but as the simple demonstration of the picture’s own possibility. Here, the possible is not a reality in waiting which only needs an existence 6. It is “that which happens undeniably and publicly without the least initial image, the least pre-conceivable essence, the least visible model and therefore the least foreseeable expectation”. 7.
It is the reason why, despite appearances, each picture repeats just one thing: its own singularity; the possibility, brought into play with each canvas, of letting its own event emerge. One might object that this is excessive speculation, and that there are formal invariants: a combination of lines, colours, traces - more-or-less accentuated, more-or-less opaque, or elaborate, or less thick, or homogeneous, or organized, etc. But not only no inventory of these forms will ever be precise enough to perfectly describe them, and allow us to dispense with their real presence, but their real presence cannot be described as such unless it disappears (let’s take the example of how we see others: all the parameters we accumulate to define a person’s profile, however precise and exact they are, will never coincide with the person in question, who I know or don’t know, who I like or detest, whose presence stimulates or bores me: it will only replace him with a complex set of data). The works of Frédéric Prat all bring about, in my view, such an evidence. Incidentally, we should remember that evidentia in Latin translates as “visibility, possibility of seeing” 8., and again in the artist’s words: “the plurality of pictures forces us to think the form of each one. Where we might expect a repetition thanks to a reduction of means, we see in fact a renewal, an opening up of the possibility to paint, and to see there where nothing can be seen.” Nothing. In other words, nothing but the picture itself.
“This evidence” adds the artist, “implies the difficulty of implementation in order to make this painting real in the long term, outside of any representation.” Because this evidence, another name for the real, for the possible or for the painting in the picture, always runs the risk of disappearing and shifting to something else: a form that we name, a preference we defend, a project we explain, a subject we seek, whereas it’s really a question of “producing an impossible figure of painting”. Impossible means the impossible before it appears, and which the picture each time, allows to happen 9.
Finally, a clarification to clear up any misunderstanding. It concerns what I have just said, and can be formulated in more-or-less the same way that Beckett did, speaking of fellow artists, in the short text he devoted to the brothers Van Velde and their pictures: “It has never been a question of what these painters do, or think they do, or want to do, but only of what I see them do” 10.
1. Frédéric Prat, interview with Clément Minighetti, in Les cahiers du Mudam #02, 2008, p. 4
2. Approx. 1535, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon.
3. Charles Le Brun, « Sentiments sur le discours du mérite de la couleur par M. Blanchard », 9 January 1672, in Les Conférences de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle, dir. Alain Mérot, Ensba, coll. Beaux-arts histoire, 1996, Paris, p. 221.
4. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes, published by Jacques Estienne, 1708, pp. 318-319.
5. This is an extract from a recent unpublished text entitled Pourquoi (pas) / Une exposition de tableaux, dans lequel Frédéric Prat livre, de manière extrêmement dense, une description de son travail.
6. Le possible est exactement comme le réel, il ne lui manque que l’existence » Pierre Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel ?, La Découverte, coll. Sciences et société, 1995. p. 14.
7. Jean-Luc Marion, Le Virtuel et le possible, a speech given during the annual public session of the five Academies, October 2011, p. 7. « Le possible n’est pas ce qui attend son passage à l’effectivité, pourvu qu’on fasse encore un effort pour en devenir le producteur ou le révolutionnaire, comme s’il ne dépendait que de nous de le produire, mais ce qui ouvre un nouvel espace à la liberté et la sauve de l’illusion mortelle de la toute-puissance », ibid., p. 8.
8. Félix Gaffiot, Dictionnaire illustré Latin Français, Hachette, Paris, 1934, p. 610.
9. « On aurait tort de ne voir ici qu’une dispute de mots : il s’agit de l’existence elle-même. Chaque fois que nous posons le problème en termes de possible et de réel, nous sommes forcés de concevoir l’existence comme un surgissement brut, acte pur, saut qui s’opère toujours derrière notre dos, soumis à la loi du tout ou rien », Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Puf, coll. Épiméthée, 1968, p. 273.
10. Samuel Beckett, Le Monde et le Pantalon, éd. de Minuit, 1989, p. 42.