Origin(e)s by Daniel Arlaud
We are invited to a beginning – a “debut” and a “commencement” in the English even more than in the French sense–, to an appearance of “New Creatures,” to be understood with all the meanings carried by these words in the two languages between which the paintings were shaped. At once an artistic première and the beginning of a new phase, this public presentation of Marie de Villepin’s works at Galerie Cham’Art serves both to reveal the origins of an artistic endeavour and to embody an intention. The work’s sincerity immediately lightens it of any temptation to cynicism, posturing or seduction.
The procession of New Creatures opens the ball. We are under the sign of the imagination, of the celebration of figures through forms, colours and lines, a complex and multiple genesis that opens up gaps where chimeras may dwell, impossible animals or upside-down sirens, head-to-toe, fish heads and human legs. And what are these eight Birds? “Birds on a wire” perching in rows on power lines, à la Leonard Cohen? Harum-scarum sorcerers’ apprentices awaiting the master? Memories on the lookout for the ghost of Tippi Hedren? They fly by the names of “Charlie,” “Dizzie” and “Thelonious,” which place them at once among the magicians of the voice, of the instrument-body capable of transfiguring reality. They take us straight to the heart of Marie de Villepin’s universe, that of the New Creatures, a title that itself resonates with the collection of poems by Jim Morrison. This is a world where creation knows no frontiers, no limits, whether between men or between the arts. A world in which art always bears the mark of an original savagery and the prophecy of the chaos to come: “Call out of the Wilderness/Call out of fever, receiving/the wet dreams of an Aztec King.” The energy of the brasses gleaming with sweat clashing their jazz like a ceremony. The freedom of improvisations that accept, in music as in painting, the idea of possession, that is, of being dispossessed of the self and seized by a force as dense as a crowd. The faith of those who knew that “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes” (Thelonious Monk) and that “music isn’t interesting, only the sounds are.” Resistance to the tenderness spread by the voices of women clashing against the carillon of this world, like Patti Smith, P J Harvey and Billie Holiday.
The New Creatures brought together for this exhibition are the animal spirits midwifing an artist for whom every birth is a resurgence. I have no qualification or other certitude to offer other than my admiration for the work undertaken by Marie de Villepin, the authenticity she gradually limns from her paintings the way a sculptor chisels it from the block. She is constructing a story, a naked tale, and the works exhibited here are its stages, to be taken for what they are, as avatars of themselves, infinitely reflected emanations of an original narrative. Her compass on this path is not a map, a system, a theory; it is the will to advance, and trust in her intuition.
This beginning is both affirmation and expression. It is, in a word, a manifesto.
The thread of creative intuition
In this visual meditation on origins, two threads interweave, that of creative intuition, the source of all images, and that of a patient retracing of the history of forms, alpha of all representations. Both lead to the sources of art.
Take the first: all the places where primary art emerged are summoned in turn by the genealogy: the possession and marginality of art brut and inspiration from the Swiss painter Unica Zürn – the resources of the spirit and psyche confronted with the fault lines of an absurd world; the magic of prehistoric cave art; the symbolic figuration of tribal arts with their power to ensorcel. Speaking of her drawings, Marie de Villepin herself says that it was as if some of them came straight from her hand, as if this had momentarily separated from her mind. All is fuel for the intuition as it expresses and manifests an existence. Imaginary friendships and affinities cross time and space. The series inspired by the cave at Lascaux, Petroglyphs, shown in a succession of rooms, like an underground path, carries the memory of paintings that, following Alain Testart, we readily believe to be suffused with a power to produce forms, to stage creation and birth in the space of a gestational cave, for “the cave is a woman.” But this reworked memory has taken charge of its interpretations, its reprises and successive evocations, under the brush of such as Miquel Barceló. In Chamber of the Felines, the animal spirits are waiting, forms loom out of the blur.
Now, it so happens that what interests Marie de Villepin are contour and line, the confrontation that occurs between surface and spirit at the moment when extracting or imprinting another reality, when conjuring up beings. The black lines wrest from the paper what the charcoal extracted from the rock surface.
Imagination is at once a vital force and the death of possibility. These New Creatures break free from the paper by the power of repeats and twists. They hang by words – names, notes taken in the course of conversations – but, in a Darwinism of drawing, they assert a hard-fought supremacy over other creatures that fed on the same energy. In What’s the Deal?, the seemingly erratic line becomes a divinatory instrument, almost automatic, manufacturing unexpected beings that are alive and, it seems, fairly provisional, as if caught in the camera’s motion blur. A blue steed seems to stretch across the lower right part of the sheet, with feet, necklines, perhaps even eyes. A bit like Claude Simon in The Flanders Road describing the hypnotic movement of the shadow of horses on the roadside: “I kept seeing them in front of me, darkly silhouetted (Don Quixote-like forms emaciated by the light that gnawed and corroded contours), indelible against the blinding sun, their dark shadows now shortened, compact, or rather telescoped, dwarfed and deformed, now stretched, stork-like, distended, repeating in condensed form and symmetrically the movements of their double verticals, to which they seemed joined by invisible tethers.” Doubles leaping out of the kingdom of shadows escape, proliferate, occupy the space of the sheet, as if freed by that question outlined in bright red that obsesses the centre of the image.
The thread of the history of forms
Along the other wire, the Bildungsroman of art, played out with all its implicit conquests of supports, spaces and pigments. The beginning that is the white canvas, the zero point of millions of possible configurations and expansions is offered up to experiment, to work and to repetition. You need to see Marie de Villepin working, the care she takes over her choice of papers, the proliferation of materials she assembles – the pencils, oil, elements of collage, the expansion of ongoing paintings, over the walls, the floor, the furniture. In the preparation that she imposes on her papers, so that, coated several times, they can be worked in oil paint, she seems to be trying to cover the whole path between paper and canvas, grasping the entire spectrum that exists between these two extremes, fragility on one side and longevity on the other. As if striving to invent a medium term that could be specifically hers.
This labour of the image demands the humility to confront paper and canvas, the humility and also the sincerity to speak to the viewer, to let their gaze be free and not entrap them with candy-coated artifices, with solipsistic swagger. Colours have a past. Marie de Villepin couldn’t care less about the roll-on swathes of fashion and the conventions of a period. In an age when life itself is becoming a collage of references to other periods, when the self can make free with past images, she multiplies quotations, borrowings, allusions and the reverberations of older works. But not as epigrams or prefaces. No, she incorporates them. Etude pour Malevitch is characteristic of her approach to the labyrinth of forms. The reference is upfront, but in fact rather ironic; there is little in common here, either in the figure or in the colours, with the austerity of the Russian Suprematist. On the contrary, the softness of a candid colour range and of curves and the serene occupation of the frame emphasise the étude aspect, the variation and repetition of the motif, a notion that is musical as well as pictorial. Elsewhere in the same series, Six Etudes pour piano-q=96, we seem to find curves and colour associations, notably yellows, reds and blacks, that echo à Miró, or, in Palimpseste, forms and frank, optimistic colours ready to line up in a poster with Rodchenko, like a still life transformed into a manifesto of modern life.
Pipe dream has something of an Expressionist landscape, a more Northern energy. It is a frank scene, all primary colours, a landscape constructed like a dream in a Bergman film. Only a few dark, purple-tinged clouds, cast their veil of disquiet – et in arcadia ego, almost. Then, looking more closely, the colours turn out to be more complex, playing on the densities of matter, on counterpoints, on an imbalance in the composition which creates an abstract vanishing line towards a distant realm beyond the painting’s upper right corner. It is glimpsed, escaping landscape, like a travelling shot adapted to the stasis of painting. Here we see something characteristic of all these paintings, an exceptional sense of movement, a cinematic approach to colour and composition that creates the conditions of vivacity.
The series Chaos reconsiders in its way the question of what a composition is: the capacity of an order – an arrangement of lines and colours, a succession of layers, finishes and techniques – to represent an original chaos. The terrain is slippery, and so she advances armed with images and tools, with the memory of Zao Wou-Ki and his “happiness in painting” inner as well outer chaos, but also his last tubes of paint, offered her by Françoise Marquet, widow of the French and Chinese painter and curator at the helm of the Fondation Zao Wou-Ki, as a kind of viaticum or talisman for confronting the demons of painting. The reds, in all their dryness and hardness, are charged with the shadows of time. Painting becomes an exercise in a filiation that is acknowledged, reconstructed. Conquered.
High-tension lines over the Atlantic
It is between these opposing poles of Marie de Villepin’s recent works that the spark is struck: one is energetic, intense, vibrant; the other, controlled, coloured and constructed. These high-tension lines are drawn tight across the Atlantic and cross the same meridians that the people of the world cross “like circus animals” in Pâques à New York by Blaise Cendrars. The vibrant American works play on colours like the chords of an electric guitar – all contrast and saturation, all power. In contrast, the European paintings are arrayed according to their own imaginary filiations, handling surface and matter in compositions that are all nuance. On one side, the dominance of line; on the other, the extension of colour.
Straddling the two continents, naming in English as well as in French, ranging her gaze across the entire world, from China to Morocco and to Latin America, Marie de Villepin represents a generation for which the world lies ready to hand like a palette of colours, words and encounters to be dashed down on paper or canvas. In her way of adventuring and appropriating, she is an American – une Américaine – like those Americans who came back to the Ubaye Valley to build strange competing houses, their hacienda-style wrought iron bearing witness to their munificence and good fortune. She is one of those for whom America is still that same land of rejuvenation, an endlessly renewed source of energy and surprises, in New York and in Los Angeles, a bit of that American dream of spaces and freedom all the more splendid for being set now and then against misty, slightly nostalgic dreams of the old country.
Quite clearly, this American imaginary is what fires the energy of Bye bye Johnny. This urban landscape is the America of French legend, the country that has inspired generations of rockers, a cityscape saturated with signs and verticals, a “forest of symbols” in which the CNN tower is the same size as a Coke bottle, since their global influence is equivalent. The city is reduced to a composition of glass boxes staring eternally at nature in the form of luxuriant palms. Life boxed up. Like those iconic Campbell’s soup cans proclaiming the triumph of Pop Art. That is the object of this farewell evoked by Johnny: a synthetic America, a collage to represent a collage. The palm trees of Malibu, the Crown Building in New York, whose name, spelt out here, is also a nod to the New Yorker Basquiat and his habit of substituting words for forms to represent objects.
But, at the same time, back in the Old World, Fresco, open to this other form of wall art, seems to be fissuring, like the cracked rendering in an old cloister, that of Saint Francis of Assisi, filled with bird speech by Giotto, or that of the cell in the convent of San Marco in Florence where the fresco by Fra Angelico eases into abstract explorations, a whole section of wall boiling with blue, identified by Georges Didi-Hubermann as the first work of deliberate abstraction. Just as much as in caves, the wall speaks, time does its work and guides the hand, the sketching of contours, of ghosts summoned, and flickers on the sheet of paper.
Weaving together painting, music and writing
On these wires where the birds are perched there walks, step by step, a funambulist, a young artist. She is edging towards herself, seeking a unity in all her artistic experiences. By getting to grips with new mediums, materials and subjects, she is working to tie together the threads, to make parallels converge. This personal project inspires us to follow her, to meet her at each stage, to await the canvases and then the large-format works that will continue the adventure. For her, painting is one of the facets of a multiple creative research in which her whole personality is always engaged. She navigates between disciplines just as she has lived between continents, alternately turning towards music and touring with her groups Pinkmist and Uni, towards painting, towards writing, towards acting. For several years now, she has been living several lives in one.
This exhibition, in which she is appearing for the first time under her own name, is also a kind of self-affirmation in a family that is exposed, by the public lives of her father Dominique de Villepin, of course, but also of her mother, an artist who works under the name of Marie-Laure Viébel. Accustomed to deflected questions in which her life and family background are brought to the fore, she is imposing her own story, told wholly in her work, in her tenacity and in her art. Her paintings in a sense stand as answers given in advance to the questions and a taking possession of her own life. Art is like a license to invent a biography. For the creator, first of all, of course, but also for those who are nourished by the works of others, who construct their own imaginary museums on which they can constantly draw.
The colour of narratives
In this sense, each of the works shown here is both a story in its own right and a piece in a bigger puzzle: a line composed for and in itself and at the same time contained in a verse, which is itself set into a poem. The artist captures moments of creation, brings forth filiations. Everything she experiences, receives and apprehends is transformed into creative material. She encapsulates narratives. Some painters are silent about their works, as if they had become estranged, or as if they needed other champions than their own selves. Whereas to look at Marie’s paintings is always to hear her talking about them. And the truth is that for anyone who knows her it is difficult to distinguish the person and her works. It is hard when you have heard her songs not to say that they are twin sisters of these paintings.
Just do IT is emblematic in this respect. The nervous, vibrant, continuous line weaves together the lives of schematic figures that are almost masks or fetishes, set in a jungle landscape. Staring eyes, tongues stuck out, giving us the finger. One thinks of tricksters, those holy clowns and divine thieves that people the mythologies of Africa and North America and whose fake or sacred madness throws the world out of kilter and yet who miraculously re-establish order. Frightening, dark kings and queens whose crowns are too big for them, like a tribute to the crowns of the heroes and martyrs of art painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and like “our corolla red/with the crimson word which we sang/over, O over/the thorn” invoked by Paul Celan in the “Psalm” of his Niemandsrose poems, an invocation of the nameless, at once nothingness and the absolute. Meaning is scattered. Words float to the surface like talismanic inscriptions – “psychiatric psychiachrist,” “smokey,” “late.” Circular figures or cogs that drive the machinery of drawing. The enigma continues even into the title, with its pressing injunction and its hint of irony about the way modern life is reduced to an advertising slogan. There is something of an appeal or an accusation here. But the colours resist the absurdity and perform a narrative function. The green of a jungle background, the reds of the collages and boxes that enclose, portion out, arrange this comic-strip universe. The loud yellows that organise the narrative, catch the gaze and lead it on, stage by stage, letting it feel its way and make sense of the objects (a crown, a banana, an aeroplane maybe). Blue is the testing of sensation and intimate experience, the obsessive feeling of having to search.
Beyond the diversity of the paintings shown here, what fixes the colours, the visible coating that gives these paintings their common luminosity, is the unity of a life. Lived experience is represented and recreated. Swimming thus seems to offer an elementary tale of existence, the sensation of floating and immersion. The forms meld together, organised by the shades of colours, the clash of purple depths and foam – an experience is similar to the one evoked by Sylvia Plath in her novel The Bell Jar: “As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.”
From one feeling to another, it is as if Marie de Villepin’s paintings seem to be cast before us like successive skins, like snapshots of condensed experiences from which we gain freedom – but only with great difficulty – by hard work.
Painting free
Their art rooted in life, it follows that these paintings also embody an art of freedom. She lets herself be guided by the desire for the new, to take possession of what is already there in order to venture elsewhere, to throw off conventions, to cry out, to up sticks. The fulfilment of the form comes in moving forward, sometimes only once the colours have apportioned everything that could be conquered, sometimes, as in Les Evaporés, well before, when, surrounded by reserve, line and colour attain a fragile equilibrium of forces. The line of the pencil thus suggests forms that we can barely make out, like a landscape swathed in clouds, Chinese fashion.
No doubt her greatest concern as she moves ahead, progressing with each step, is to invent a language capable of expressing a sensibility. She is honing her imagination, that faculty which continues to resist the assault of the cognitive sciences precisely because it is a kind of synthesis of all the faculties, a mobilisation of the senses, of thought, of associative logic and the oceanic resources of intuition, forming a mode of thought in images, a thinking through sensibility, reversing the experience of the senses so as to touch, feel, hear and see what is absent.
In a world with blurred frontiers, between cultures, between past, present and future, between nature and technologies, in which the individual seems fated to have to constantly reconstruct herself, art remains our only lifeline, the last rampart of the self, that “Lost ego, shattered by stratospheres,/Victim of the ion – : Gamma-ray lamb –/Particle and field –: chimeras of infinities/Upon your grey stone of Notre-Dame.” (Gottfried Benn)
In this sense, all painting is an inner landscape. Sumptuous in its movement, now tormented, now ample, sovereign and cyclical, Crows conveys the impression of a winter’s day swirled by swarms of black birds. Shadow and light still battle it out, wearing themselves out, allowing the upwelling, side by side, separated only by the quivering of a shadow-wing, of sparks of brightness and the blue rifts of night in the majesty of a charged sky shot through with crackles of red. We sense that we are in a familiar landscape, the one explored by Georg Trakl, where “Above the black corner, at noon/the harsh-cawing crows rush in,” where the “birds disappear like a funeral procession/Into the air that trembles with pleasure”: “O, how they trouble the brown silence.”
Echoing which, Ingeborg Bachmann, speaking of “cunning crows,” states that “Only those that have wings fall.” And yet, seated at this feast in the City of Birds, flight is all that counts.