When a writer meets a painter
It's been a while that I'm working with artists and painters, including Antoine Bouhour's world.
I love visiting artists' studios, and when the work of one of them likes me, I immediately feel the urge to write from their universe.This is a chance for a writer to be able to as well, the time for a meeting or a text, sometimes longer, living this form of complicity.
Insomnius night
Obviously the light is essential to the painter and so is the night for Antoine Bouhour.
Night,
like a shelter or shroud.
Bodies and scenery become more sensitive to other realities through fumes and twilight flickering.
If Alice crosses the imaginary Lewis Carrol’s mirror, Antoine Bouhour’s monotypes, these crowded lonelinesses, seem to go opposite path. Hung by the painter’s eye, they come back from beyond the mirror. Stroking or hammering the glass, the artist moulds and reveals the oil, next comes the squeezing. Hand against paper with all the weight of body, weight of desire or of intention.
Below, the matter is waving.
Rooting up paper will allow the form-shaped to emerge, embossed. Gifted of an inaudible vulnerability, we are born from the crunching glass as of silk.
The body,
liquid, solid.
The body,
everywhere, all the time.
The body, like an utopia
encaged too often,
too long.
The body,
like a place, a dwelling,
a flesh of the thought. This one is believed well nested into the hollow of the mirror.
The body,
thick with nervous, muscular and bony memories, full of moods in the Greek meaning; and also in the meaning of what is crossing us. The shadow of certain things.
From the mirror images are gushing upon us before they escape and pursue their own life. The painter’s gesture wriggles from the mirror. Of another reality in which we are lost, but well warmed. In-mirrored.
Invariably, the history of art and representation tells about the body and skin-deep memories.
For all that, Antoine Bouhour’s monotypes aren’t representative. Possibly, they look like hasty figures sliding from edge of the day to edge of the night.
A dash of movement as powerful as God or monster of Olympus.
An emotion or thrilling like a portrait of our time. This time we cover ourselves of wrinkles, folds or swellings. Of an unquestionable beauty. Of our past and future predetermined by our mortal condition. By our desertions, doubts and what we hold ourselves in, overflowing and silences appearing through the artist’s fingers.
Without a mirror or the artist’s eye, or another eye, how could we know what body we are living in? What life is cracking in, crying and thrilling? In us. Out of us.
Sometimes, the monster is here, such a double. Antoine Bouhour doesn’t repeat his models or his feelings stolen from life. No loyalty in his gesture but a possibility of another world. Glance a bit misplaced before the hand crushing colours on the paper. Driving us from matrix to the tummy of what we are, the time of the monotype isn’t the picture time. Stolen memories, feelings and figures forwarding through the painter’s body, exhausting or glorifying him.
Therefore many worlds are opened from which rise up landscaped-body, carved-loneliness, and the body becomes mineral, vegetal or archetypal but always made of flesh and blood.
It’s murmuring
Swinging
Foaming
Vivifying
It’s speaking, beyond
the virtual, real, imaginary, disguised, mummified, and tattooed body, like many attempts to be unforgotten. From this joyful or ashamed, tumultuous, sensualist, limpid or opaque, warlike or ghostly body, from the caved-body like a trunk full of textual and scar memories, Antoine Bouhour cuts off a fragment.
As a painter-sculptor, he prints this residue of our humanity, mingling death and life. From his insomnious nights, we stand out scarred, all bandaged up, perforated, lying but still alive. Because we are connected, linked, mingled to these other worlds, stories, pasts and memories whitened by the shadow of our nights and nightmares. Of our hopes.
From brush to oil, from knife to glass, from arm or hand to the pattern that is forming and deforming, from breath to the rounded-back other feelings of ourselves come to light.
Do we sleep in the mirror because we are so delicate and wobbly?
Dragged out of light we are born from night, such nomads. So transhumance is done from the memory’s wrinkles to these of skin. Wounds or retrievals, only the watcher can say. Only the painter can testify, because he gives us back what he cuts off.
Ghostly, loved, hated, possessed or dispossessed, abused or glorified, but still here, stigmatized or excommunicated, rebels or slaves, our memory and body dance, wince or smile, enjoy or die.
No background in these monotypes.
Nothing to take us away from what is rising up.
Nothing to take us away from what is disturbing and becoming incarnated,
patched,
latticed,
lacerated,
engraved,
ossified,
We’ve dreamt ourselves as heroes, lover, seductress, purveyor of life or death, we’ve hoped ourselves as unique, beautiful, indestructible, off camera, out of control, out. Whereas, we’re in levitation, in apnoea.
And a voice says,
ages of the body, marks or traces, the lived wars, the price of the tears, the choice of a smile, the leather of the skin, the grave of the bones, of tearing and damaged laughs, the survival, the mortality, the vitality, our paupers’ graves, our clumsy births. The hope is hardly anchored that already Morpheus or Thanatos song hypnotizes or devastates us. Entombs or raises us.
In the ancient Greece, the word used for the body appears the first time in Homer’s writings to describe a corpse.
Then,
the corpse like the mirror teach us that we have a body and this one gets a weight and a mass, has an identity and a living requirement.
Day as night, there is a hypothesis of oneself,
Outline, luminous shadow, doing and undoing or transforming story in
Meeting
Breaking off
Say it or not
L’être ou le néant
¿Cómo
se incendia
la noche?
The mirror is the time of this memory that is the flesh.
Alone, we can’t rarely access it. Death or birth are fundamental events in which we will ever be absent, because without memories. Remains the loving body – physical, emotional, erotic, sensorial, imaginary or imagined, built to the back of the other. An inside or outside clinch.
Between Eros and Thanatos,
Nocturne for an embodied one.
The clay makes the body, and the body generates ashes, into an ancestral, eternal and futurist cycle.
Gesture, brush, knife, oil, glass, squeezing, the paper and the eye-memory of the painter are doing or undoing from one monotype to another one. Root and free us of the mirror. When Eros is here, it means that the body is here too, even it looked, kidnapped, hoodooed, rejected or taken, hated or loved. It means that the body couldn’t escape from Here, because it has successfully crossed the mirror.
Entonces una voz dice
Mas alla del espejo, estas siempre en mi mente
Y es dolorosamente maravilloso
Lalie Walker
Nantes, April 2015
