Robert Clévier, “Au Ferret, aux bords” exhibition, drawings and paintings 2015- 18.
Interview with Nathalie Gruska Flornoy, December 2024

NGF. – Ten years after your long period of work among the vines, you spent a few days each summer from 2015 to 2018 in Cap-Ferret; you sketched there and returned to your studio to produce the graphic works we are exhibiting.

RC. – There are charcoals, graphite and pastels.

NGF. – We can guess that it’s about the basin, the pignots (pronounced with the T, from the Gascon “pinhòt”), the oyster beds… When you were there, what surprised or questioned you?

RC. – At times, it was possible to work.

NGF. – You can see shapes that have been erased, blurred and pearly.

RC. – In the morning, I walked from one cove to the next. At Le Ferret, the earth plays with the water, which is playful. In the evening, the idea came to me to paint the line between two moments, the tides.

NGF. – Your work here and there shows two regular geometries that entirely constitute, without loss or reserve, the unique form of two “landscapes”, land and water. Yet how different are the local physical features of the vineyards and the basin!

RC. – The vines move forward slowly, according to seasonal rhythms. In winter, after pruning, depending on whether the soil is bare or grassy, the vines darken, forming braziers of silhouettes that, in contrast to the green or sienna, seem to cling on, and
articulate themselves in the distance. In spring, after a brief period of dew, a homogeneous plane of native green suddenly covers the plots, dissolving their boundaries.

The light of the vines can be seen as it is said to be, as it is described and defined: univocally oriented straight lines. At the edge of the basin, the sand is composed of oyster shells and mother-of-pearl; the water splashes, the straight lines break into thousands of
tiny pieces, diffracting in as many divergent and rebounding directions, as if the grains of sand and the water were mixing with so many mirrors, forming an illuminated horizon, a cloud of optical phenomena, a spectacular phase of light.

NGF. – At Le Ferret, the pace is fast, the tides and variations constant.

RC. – The background emerges and shows through, the sky forms puddles, the earth mists, dunes; at what point can pignots be perceived as woods, and not as retinal persistence, enigmatic tremors, flashing signals, traces, shadows? Here, sheltered from
the sea and perhaps its powers, reflections burst forth; and there, solid parcels like legions, unchanging turtles receiving light in beams.
Comparing these two concrete landscapes, or even representing them by contrasting the attributes that can be attached to them (dry/net versus wet/ flou, graphic/plastic, plastic/graphic, painting/drawing, etc.), underlines the fact that they owe a great deal to vision, the sensitive and inventive faculty of spaces; to sight through the projection of its optics, to vision since this “seeing” is to turn reality into an epidermis.
I’ve worked to question and measure the relative importance of this perception, alongside other senses. My practice has been transformed by the need, to which I as a painter and as a person have come together, the need to question reality and the world
on other planes, according to other logics and modalities than those that depend on vision and its power.

NGF. – The colors in the paintings entitled “Route de Pauillac” and “Environs de SaintEmilion” are made up of very lightly colored layers of acrylic. There can be many such passages, following one another over several years.

RC. – What’s important here are as much or more the periods, intermediate between work sessions, as the contributions made during these sessions. The results of the work depend on the intuitive choice of the moment to paint; there is one moment, not a
thousand possibilities, for each act; my sensitive certainty has little to do with what I have to do, but is constituted as the moment of this doing.

NGF. – This applies to all your work. In Cap-Ferret, you use pastels and graphite for the color. Why did you change materials?

RC. – Is black a color?

NGF. – Yes!

RC. – Depending on whether you consider black to be a color or not, these works will be viewed diUerently. Color has long meant “light”. Your eyes perceive blacks as colors – are you hoping for a black light?
I use blacks, a few of all those I can get my hands on – my rule is: few vocabularies, many equivalents of a syntax – I use variations of blacks for the transitional phases between blacks and colors, since optical colors proceed from the degradations of black – that’s what my experiences teach me; on the vines, it was a question of chromatism, but at Le Ferret, the colors were, optically, cameos of gray obtained by declination, “erasure” (of the face).
Dilution during these years 2015, and in the previous period, work with traces of color; using the lowest tonalities, making with infraliminary perceptions, I was looking for micro-transformations that, one after the other, superimposing themselves, would
certainly constitute a material load of pigments but not a density sufficient to be fixed, named “a color”; I don’t know what “a color” is, since it has to do mainly with the way acrylic gels are drawn, oriented, blurred, laid, successive and simultaneous states
through and between which light penetrates and circulates, is slowed down or pushed along at different angles. … this “non-knowledge” says more about my practice (the preparation of materials as well as my actions) and the pre-eminence of my aesthetic intuitions in all circumstances, than any constituted knowledge.
Starting in 2013 or ’14, I returned to the use of pastels, with gestures comparable to those I’ve just described (in acrylic painting), where the quantity of material can once again reach the point of dust.
The introduction of blacks in the very first acts was a new development, bringing into play the relationship between “objective” colors (in this case, pastels) and “subjective” optical colors (also known as pre-hallucinatory colors), which are produced
on the surface of blacks according to their tonalities.
From 2015 onwards, it seemed to me that an idea had to be upheld, such as that no gesture, no intervention could remain visible according to its own logic; that there was no fundamental gesture other than a second gesture, a second attempt which at once depended on the first, curved its development, and therefore did not depend on it in the foreseeable sense. This requirement was asserted through new practices and new results, hence what you call “pearly, whitened, foggy aspects”. It seems to me that any
graphic or plastic reality can only be maintained, can only have a future, by the action that repairs it (so that, in retrospect, my acrylic techniques today seem to me to be part of a logic of natural growth!).

NGF. – Your vineyard paintings are diptychs; the Ferret drawings are not.

RC. – They all have at least two parts and a separation. They all have to do with landscapes which, compared to other spaces where diUerent logics, diUerent types of hold and evolution mingle, are first and foremost constructed and controlled to the point of saturation: only this maximum can be seen, every aspect, down to the most peripheral, coming under the exclusive control of invariable wills placed at the service of total, continuous possession, of a fence unifying the physical, customary, legal and normative
properties of these spaces.
A single, endogenous space-time; at its borders, the foreign; the figure I meet waiting here, is that of the event, the accident, and the chance that will decide when in such strong hands, these hulls at the moment they are handed over to new generations, will break.
Metaphors: the vines, inflexible, until the acme of the harvest, when a new ascending sequence begins, until a new acme which, as it were, will present the fruit cut from its earthly roots to the secret of its final degrees of fulfillment. The basin, acme continued, vaguely alternative, post-modern.
During the period 1999-2010, I questioned not time as such, but spacing, a concept that I hoped painting would enable me to suspend.
From there, a few years later, I came to question the division into two parts in the sense of form; my practices experimented with this crazy separation, that is, not of representations, but – was it the principle on which our entire Western system of representation rests: dualism, and the dialectic that is its apparent movement?