From 9 March to 7 April 2018
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
FROM THE WORLD OF SPEEDS AND SLOWNESSES TO THE KNOTS OF VERTIGO
“One day a depth began to appear in my paintings, and I plunged in, I threw myself headlong into exploring it.” I would like to take up this fine quotation, used as the epigraph to a text by Xavier-Gilles Néret. Because these washes, shown today in 2018, have precisely no depth, but a flat horizontality. They do not form a Möbius knot, no about-turn, no two-faced knot, no recto-verso, but a surface with a single face, sinuous, imposing its rhythm, following the calligraphic gesture until the support is replaced by another support. The two-faced knot recalls that prehistoric tool, the biface, the first multi-purpose technology, a means of drawing a perfect curved cutting edge from the shattering of the structures of flint. Bernard Saby invites us to look at these washes with an eye laden with a whole prehistory of today’s history of painting. Or else various mediations lead us to look as such at what was, like the entire body of work no doubt, only a mental exercise of a strictly private order, a personal and intimate work, and therefore secret, inviolable and to be preserved from public profanation. These are traces and signatures. Far Eastern signatures of an unjustly overlooked painter: what is favoured here is the sensuality of the line, the trace, memory, the mnemonic trace of a strong but vanished, or evanescent, gesture. So this is a rather flat exploration, exploring the potential of the surface rather than knowledge through the abyss, an essentially old project, Baudelairean and Romantic, that of the “skirter of abysses” (Patrick Waldberg).
Artist: Bernard Saby