From 17 March to 15 April 2023
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
Opening on Thursday 16 March 2023
At the heart of the matter
Art expresses human life in what is at once personal and universal about it. In art, what is beautiful is the truthful, the authentic, achieved without concession or compromise. It is not a matter of the artist forcing himself to be original, a superficial notion, but rather of managing to be himself without worrying about any outside opinion, favourable or not.
Seeking the truth amounts to giving meaning to existence. Beauty can be defined as the fruit of a quest for meaning. From this point of view, I am convinced that art that seeks only to please touches no one deeply. Does Miyazaki not say that had he sought to please, his films would already be forgotten!
The sense of beauty is linked to an individual’s faculty of perception and bears witness to his development; it is, in short, the result of a life’s journey.
Aesthetics is more closely linked to culture and style, and so remains a formal question. Yet it was by this path that I approached the world of art and that, under the influence of the great masters of the past and also of Surrealism, I embarked on my pictorial research. I was studying architecture at the time. I worked carefully on drawing, composition and painting technique, multiplying preparatory sketches, anxious for formal and technical perfection.
During the 2000s a transformation gradually took place, which took me from a studious, controlled approach to painting to one that is deliberately improvised and spontaneous.
The perfection I seek to attain today does not depend on the result obtained, but on the attitude to work, which I want to be right, simple and natural, hard to describe from the outside. It depends on a state of presence to oneself, in which attentive listening marked by kindness, by the absence of desire or expectation, is the rule that alone allows the giving of oneself: it is then that true life flows through the artist without resistance, without jolts, whatever happens.
That is the state I seek to reach today when I set to work. In the best of cases the result comes about unexpectedly and surprises even me.
Didier Mazuru, Stockholm, 29 April 2019
My vision of art:
Art is above all a field of experience for the one who makes it, as for the one who discovers it. It is not so much a matter of understanding or liking as of learning to connect with the world one approaches.
There is no creativity without discovery, and therefore without astonishment. Astonishment is at the heart of the creative act.
To my mind, creating means managing to surpass oneself while remaining true to oneself, and therefore acting without compromise.
Likewise, for the viewer, encountering an authentic pictorial world means above all managing to go beyond one’s own limits.
Thus the fact that we are all different is a real wealth, provided we manage to open up and listen to one another.
The function of major art is therefore not so much to seek to please as to disturb (among other things, as I have already stressed, by leading us to flirt with our limits). For seeking only to please steers us in a very superficial direction.
And when Picasso was asked what beauty meant to him, he replied that in his work he was not seeking beauty but truth.
This is, to my mind, that singular, many-faceted truth buried deep within us.
The artist was present at the gallery on Saturday 8 April 2023. A short video was made as a preview of the exhibition.
Artist: Didier Mazuru