Robert Clévier, exhibition ‘Landscapes, Passages,’ drawings and paintings | 20 August – 14 September.

Interview with Nathalie Gruska Flornoy, December 2024

LANDSCAPES, PASSAGES

NGF – The titles of these paintings, grouped under the heading « Landscapes, Passages, » refer to specific places where you work.

RC – Would these concrete local features alone be enough to turn them into landscapes? Or is it rather their opposite, ‘the environment’—an overbearing word that reduces multiplicity to a single possibility—that now, and perhaps from here on, holds the power to question places, the very verb ‘to inhabit,’ and so on?

NGF – Are your paintings questioning whether the world—reality itself—is still habitable today?

RC – If there is a ‘place’ that inhabits me—one I can inhabit—it is painting.

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NGF – Could you tell us about your techniques?

RC – At the art supply store, I buy acrylic binder, tubes of ‘colors,’ and pure metallic oxides in powder form.

NGF – You pay at the register.

RC – Back home, I prepare my mixtures: a few grams of ‘color’ diluted in a large quantity of acrylic binder; the ‘color’ of these translucent milks is thus extremely faint, barely discernible or identifiable when applied in thin films.

The rule is that for each painting until its completion, I use three primaries: a certain yellow, a certain red, a certain blue, which I apply in strokes and glazes that, if you will, we’ll call Y, R, B. Depending on whether it’s glazes Y, R, Y, B, R, B, Y, etc., that are layered, or Y, B, Y, B, R, R, etc., a particular ‘hue’ gradually becomes perceptible, sharpening without losing its belonging to an unfinished, unresolved register.

NGF – You speak of using three primaries as a ‘rule.’

RC – From the outset, it’s necessary to dismantle petrified references and, in particular, to prepare the conditions under which a certain mixture of ‘colors’ and textures will be clearly and exceptionally acceptable.

The more limited the palette, the stronger the demand for specific gestures, the more necessary the differences between ways of applying, depositing, stretching, smoothing, etc., these gels—that is, the behaviors of light circulation between the layers, once again nearly transparent, are specific to each situation.

The ‘colors’? They concern me insofar as my work with light allows them to escape definitions as long as there are neither plastic or graphic saturations nor pictorial events occurring here. That a becoming-by-itself presents itself.

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If nothing has been decided…

RC – To paint – is it to act on the initial “aesthetic” intuition that first came to me? If so, what does this consent mean, this acting without any existing or consciously sought articulation that would organize meaningful relations between these two realities? Each seems to obey its own laws; would these two autonomies, mutually negating each other, constitute the necessary conditions for the “creation” of a form?

To name this relationship, this vibration with no apparent link – perhaps without causality – would require another language, one that would demand of me, right now, to heed the primal intuition without conditions, as my practice allows, answering it wordlessly. Outside this experience, I do not know whether dwelling means anything.

to be touched, to fall back into painting

to touch the dreadful deprivation