| FR
Extract from Figures&Co. chapter 11
Christine Buci-Glucksmann
I am interested in the young generation of artists which have embraced the transformations of Art. In an era of virtuality, Internet, artificial lighting and overlaying transparencies.
When I met Hervé, I wrote a paper on the crossing of aspects or transparencies, as you prefer. It seemed to me that he recaptured Picabia’s or Polke’s transparencies, in the sense that he treated the canvas as a screen, and this screening force took on different shapes in his work. From his baroque motifs, he was able to create transparent hybrid images, heterogeneous images in which one can see rafts of flowers or superimposed battle ships. A world both angelical, and warlike.
So, through something that I am fond of, which I call the “decorative” in the sense of Matisse, of baroque, and perhaps in the sense of mannerism, he was able to rewrite precisely this, in the Art of a virtual era.
(…)
We could rightly speak of a somewhat contemporary and a tad technological neo-baroque.
Baroque is both movement and artifice, the body and the pose. Baroque is at the same time revealing everything and hiding other things. This double reading, this way of showing while concealing, of showing the sails, of covering the canvas of light, is a contemporary reinvention of Baroque.
There is a complex route taking us from an acknowledged Baroque to a reinvented one.
Baroque creates light, chiaroscuro, rediscovers a chiaroscuro which has been forgotten for centuries to the profit of a painting that is easily decipherable. In Hervé’s “light” paintings, the lights are artificial ones, but one does not really know whether it is the canvas that reflects the world or if it captures it, in a more traditional way of speaking: a figurative or an abstract canvas. It is this double reading which I like in his work.
(…)
Transience is the capture and the modulation of an instant. It is not a rupture in the moment, it is a vibration.
In the end, what I called the reality of fluxes: we quickly and brutally went from a culture of objects, which is the modernist culture, to the culture of fluxes which ever it’s form may be and which is today’s culture. It seems that Hervé IC explores the form of fluxes in light, in scenery, in flowers and on faces.
(…)
What I look for in Art is the exploration of new dimensions. It is one of Polke’s expressions, which means it is Art originating both from outer space and urbanism. An art which is in the end, non religious and non Christian. An art that places us in the immanence of the world.
It seems that, in regards to painting, I am paradoxically a believer of a post-Duchamp and post-Warhol painting.