| FR
The transitory without the eternal
excerpts from a text by Anne Malherbe
collection mes pas à faire au Creux de l’enfer, 2007
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The characters clearly belong to one generation- “Rodox” is about the seventies. “Rave” is more recent. Each work is clearly set in a specific context.
This notion of ‘context’ is very dear to the artist. He thinks that you can only come to fiction after locating one painting into its context.
According to him, “Rodox” refers to the so-called moral liberation in the seventies. This liberation is more of a pose. Composed as the pictures’ replica of the pornographic review “Rodox,” notably trio scenes, the works prove so. In these stereotyped kinds of situations, imitation is at the centre of seduction. This has nothing to do with liberty. The second series, “Rave,” stages some dancing teenagers, isolated inside a solid. They are the consequence of the first series: A generation lost in one history that transfixes them without offering any structure.
What matters here is not to agree or to disagree with what the artist says but to be aware of two facts.
First, it is possible to admit that painting and its time are so imprecated that it’s difficult to know what results or what escapes from one era in it. Painting is not necessarily meant to provide us with the second characteristic of Baudelaire’s ‘modernism’ – the ‘eternal’. The first one: the ‘transitory’ just has to help us to understand what we live. Our view on the ‘eternal’ is obviously restricted, so who could rightfully acknowledge it?
Second, being obsessed with context also gives information on how this painting – mainly composed of overlapping- works. Indeed, its is less of one matter resulting from one background – some habits resulting from one environment – rather than a network of internal and external links.
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