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Implement of the sea into a work of art :Gardair's blueby Jean-Michel MAULPOIX Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
Did one ever succeed in painting the sea ?
I don't mean either its shores, or its rollers, its changing skies, its swimmers or its ships, but the blue extension of its surface whose power of attraction seems to hold to what it covers or reflects, i.e. its very invisibility. Rather than the picturesque survey which it grants us from its shores, how can one paint the oceanic feeling of the open blue or the indefinite day-dreams we feed through it ? On the surface of the sea, as much as on the face of a person, both inside and outside attract each other, hold conversation, magnetize and join. All the way to the fictitious skin of the waves, the very depth goes up again and shivers, the sky sinks into it, bathing it with its light. In order to succeed in painting the sea, one should thus be able to capture its countenance, its mobility, its states of mind, nay the diffuse thought of this material of blue water whose threadbare knots itself from underneath and in which the sun clearness comes to run through as if it were a thread. Now, painting, as one is well aware, is first and foremost a matter of motionlessness, of framing, and of verticality, right the reverse of the open blue apparently horizontal and infinite. It doesn't mean that it were not able to offer us but a small basement window of blue, a cheating and disappointing fragment, but, rather, that its task is to topple the horizon, to look upon the ocean full face, to dig its face and carefully frame its surface as to grasp the feeling of that very immensity on a restricted space.
Christian Gardair seems to have endeavoured that in his most recent works. The sea is implemented into a work of art. He works at it and he is worked by it. It doesn't become the motif or the implicit subject of his canvasses but takes up its challenge. He carries into the painting a vast array of emotions felt at its contact. The son of a naval officer, himself a sailor when he fancies it, familiar both with the sails and the canvasses, he knows how to pay careful attention to the deep moves of the heavy swell and the unexpected light breeze on the dead calm. Hence such infinite variations of light and hidden mobility of the waters may have become the patterns of his painting , the sea thus helping him to know better its own means, demands and secrets. The maritime inspiration, after the observation of the careful hewing of wine stocks in Blayais, or of the weaving of Moroccan carpets, become an incentive to meditate upon, and dig even deeper into, the logic of his own work, made both of repetitions and minute variations. But this time, with the sea, a more flexible art delineates itself in which the loop prevails over the line. And such a new suppleness doesn't only hold on to the liquid nature of the element enticing the painter : it can be understood through the dreamy nature of the bond that ties him to his subject.
Far from turning Christian Gardair away from his path, the desire he feels to give in through his painting of an appeal of a vast horizon leads him to tighten it on to its safest properties. He doesn't yield to the temptation to pretend touching the open sea by any pulling off of a gesture but, rather, he develops and amplifies his humble repetitive task which wipes off or covers the initial lyrical surge so as to reach a pictorial weaving as sound and firm as that by which the very molecules of immensity seem to affix themselves. He becomes closely akin to excess through the least, he reaches the idea of a totality through choice. Hence painting the sea paradoxically ends up in separating the picture from the canvas that holds it and hangs it before it as if it were some kind of linen or of shroud. The strokes, the lines and the knots are so multifarious, so tight and so dense that the painted surface seems to hold upright just by itself as if it were a virtual net hung in front of the canvas. The sea keeps alive the dream with no prop ; it compels one to erect a vertical object, very much like it, i.e. devoid of bonds, in which the very depth were the sublimation of a surface.
Such a linen, or net, is, however, but a curtain held in front of the invisible. What we don't grasp must be dressed without hiding. Hence everything here takes place in the ajar or in-between. First the animation of a such a screen patiently worked through the repetition of the very same obstinate and plane gestures but that will soon sparkle under our eyes in the same way as the ocean expanse itself, through the presence of minute variations, cracks, unevenesses or flaws. Then, the erotic character of such an object which both at the same time time hides and reveals, dresses and undresses the sea, comes close or goes away and constitutes, when all is said, a projective surface that lends itself to a vast array of interpretations and welcomes willingly the day-dreams of all. The fate and the meaning of the painting are thus to be found on the thread of this long work of repetitions-variations introducing an embryo of temporality amid the canvas' is all at once that of the stroke, of the line, of the loop and of colour. Its characteristic features are variations of intensity, frequency, range and magnitude. The painting thus achieves the tasks of a marigraph or scintillometer. It invents once again for its own motto the hazards of the heavy swells and light breeze, it measures the shimmerings of the sea. It becomes this net of a weird kind into which light and the very desire henceby experienced by anyone rather than a miraculous draught of fishes. It resembles in the end those very old potteries, all cracked, that are sometimes to be found in the depths of the ocean. Surely a painting cannot possibly shut in and contain the sea but by that very thing that normally enables the water to be drained off, i.e. manifold chancy cut-outs, breaking up points, minute gapings. Possession works wonders through its very flaws, meaning is at work and knowledge can take place.
Christian Gardair's painting is oceanic in the the least : it grasps, means and gives to see within a limited geometrical and motionless space, the movement and the expanse grasped not extensively, but through the ever-insisting glistening of a painting seeming to aim at letting itself loose from you. A painter may thus answer the call of the sea, remaining a long time stuck to his canvas as the writer does in front of his sheet of paper, becoming the patient skilled worker of joints and crossings up to knowing how to inscribe on a restricted frame a huge horizon of potentialities. He knows that the sea never ever lets itself be caught or restitute ill-gotten gains, but it may inscribe itself in a painting every time, the latter substitutes the feeling of an indefinite array of probabilities to what is already there caught in its old shape. Implementing the sea into a work of art is after all nothing but that very endeavour : pating the latent, i.e. potentially… When a work thus unwinds itself in the dreamy evocation of its own liabilities and accomplishes itself in the very restraint of its expenditure, thus, the activity of the mind does find itself valued against the fate of the real.
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