| FR
General Consideration on the Flowers
by Hervé Georges Ic, october 2022
This collection began in 1996, when I returned from New York, where I had seen for the first time the “all-over” paintings of Jackson Pollock, Philip Taaffe, Ross Bleckner, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman… and many others. The ease with which American painting embraces the surface has always impressed me greatly, as it marks a clear difference from European painting. What remains of European culture is this need for depth, for a universal and philosophical explanation for everything. It is ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. If Europe was defeated by American consumerism (you have to think of the market economy as a war machine to understand today’s world), then these often forced attempts to give deep meaning to works of art must be understood as a final form of resistance. In this respect, I really like this European stubbornness, and I recognize myself in it.
At the time, in 1996, formalism and geometric abstraction dominated among art critics, and expressionist followers dominated the French market. All this seemed to me a hypocritical way of mimicking Americans and Germans such as Schnabel and Baselitz. I wanted to start afresh. If anything was worth preserving at the end of this weary 20th century, it was the principle of laying new foundations for everything. My new foundation would therefore be slowness, smoothness, and depth through transparency.
That year, I met the future mother of my son in New York. She worked at the Guggenheim Museum Soho. She is Japanese and gave me her photos of “Kasuga-yama,” the primeval forest of Nara, where her family comes from. When I returned, I began working on paper, creating large combinatorial compositions of flowering branches and parakeets, which became a decorative motif similar to tapestry. I really worked in this direction, but it didn’t bring me any luck because my attempts were widely mocked and copied afterwards.
I say “collections” or “themes” because they cannot be called “series.” They are not industrial, serial productions, nor are they even “compositions” in the sense of graphic arrangements. They are perhaps ‘organizations’ in the “organic” sense of living things. Plant forms that blend together in an improvised way, neither chaotic nor intelligible.
The transparency and lightness of the treatment allow for additions without saturation.
The bright lines that sometimes appear in the background come from dance canvases. Originally, they were ring ropes or musical scores. They mark the opposition between the rational and the vegetal. Nature does not “think” like humans; it does not organize itself, compose itself, economize itself, compromise itself, calculate itself, and takes advantage of everything. I find it very restful to observe nature for what it brings us that is foreign to ourselves. The human world is unfinished, feeble, and saturated, too full of itself. Too full of strategic thinking, systems, mechanisms, and calculated anticipations that make the human mind a constant competition, even in its rest. The human spirit is impoverished by its riches.
These flowers are real, on different scales. I find them in the street, in gardens, in the countryside. They grow wherever they can, sometimes in dog urine. They are modest street flowers. They are never commercial flowers, which is why there are no vertical stems. I mainly look for stems that come from above, from the side, running along the bottom, crossing the canvas… This increases the feeling of being inside, underneath, in the middle of the vegetation and not grasping it.
I like the fact that these paintings cannot be memorized. You can scan them with your eyes, follow their intertwining lines, and photograph them. But you can’t copy them because they have no logical or finite meaning.