Andreas Weiland
Luc Piron's "Asparagus 3" (2008)
4 panels with a total size of 120 x 305 cm
Encountering this work of Luc Piron, other, earlier works
done by him come to mind. Particularly, the works of the Hortus series
that relied so much on the combination or montage of a panel that showed
a computer print, and another panel that was a counterpart - a painting.
That painting often was a black rectangle or black square, with small variations
of the intensity of black: small, anthracite or dark grey or not quite
so dark grey rectangles that seemed to be inserted into or "cut" out of
the black space. The computer prints, on the other hand, were derived from
reproductions taken from an old book on the Hortus Eichstettienis, a book
that showed carefully done, early modern botanical depictions of the plants
of the Eichstaett garden. These old depictions, works that had been achieved
several hundred years ago, were already the result of a reproduction process
then very modern. Fine drawings were reproduced by way of etchings. These
were , in a way, the beginnings of technically (or as Walter Benjamin would
say, "technologically") reproduced art in modern times. When the modern
reprint was done, it meant a further but perhaps, from the artist's point
of view, a bit more casual reproduction process, aiming at utmost faithfulness
in duplicating the images of the ancient book. Taking this reproduced material
as his starting point, Luc Piron has pursued the opposite aim: not 'faithful
copying' but 'Verfremdung', if I may use here a term proposed by Brecht.
Luc's computer prints appear as manipulated, displaced, transferred
images from the book in question. The Hortus Eichstettiensis images (treated
almost as 'found objects', objets trouvés) have undergone diverse
processes of analogous and digital reproduction, of diminuition and enlargement
that in the end made them 'strange' and 'different.' Different from
what? For one thing, certainly from the starting point or 'basic'
material encountered at the outset. We may still sense the affinity that
exists between the images encountered in the book and the 'final result'
derived from them, the computer prints integrated in art works combining
prints and paintings. In the case of the earlier works of the Hortus series,
we could even think that we 'recognized' large blow-ups of tiny sections
of etchings reproduced in the book: enigmatic images that took on a Rorschach-like
quality, that had become ambiguous, janus-headed: suggesting a distorted
human face perhaps at the same moment that we saw 'unnaturally' large,
mysterious petals of a flower that was more like a flesh-eating plant than
a rose now. In other words, each displacement achieved by exposing
an image from the reproduced book to several, simple or complex, modern
reproduction processes brought about none of the easily recognizable, scientifically
relevant, botanically studied - in other words, 'naturalistic' - plant
images that the early modern artist obviously had aimed at. Instead,
we
were seeing irritating forms. Sometimes suggestive of animal or human
or humanoid figures. Of beings that perhaps 'mixed' animal and human and
plant forms and traits. As in the case of the surrealists of the 1930s
and 40s, the inspiration for this came from visual encounters with 'everyday
life': a mere book that reflected, in its own way, an encounter with 'everyday
reality' - that of the garden seen and studied a long time ago. But
it becomes obvious that this reality is not taken to be transparent and
immediately accessible or easily understood. It holds secrets, it remains
'un empire de la mystère.'
Much of what I say here in general about Luc's more recent
way of working, and specifically about the Hortus series, can be
said about Asparagus 3, as well. Despite its difference, it appears to
me like an echo of the Hortus works. Or rather, a continuation of the process
of exploration I encountered there. A further, still more radical search
or a new attempt to probe, to intrude more deeply, into the secrets of
reality and the mysterious language of forms, colors, visual rapports.
While we encounter, again, the basic strategy of combining
a computer print and, as a counterpart, painting, this time the concrete
visual realization is more complex: instead of a black, painted space
we get in this work two white (perhaps cream-white) spaces or areas or
panels. Paintings that appear, mentally, as 'pure white' - as an 'emptiness'
evocative of silence each time our looks touch them, in a rhythm interrupted
by what is 'in between.' Their concrete, physical 'whiteness' alternates,
however, with the whiteness of two other panels that are not monochrome.
One of them is a painting, the other a computer print. In one case
(the panel to the left, that is to say, the computer print) we see minute
splashes as well as clusters of blacks and colors within a white
surface, like musical notes in the midst of the whiteness of a sheet of
music. And, in the other case (the painted panel installed in between two
white, monochrome paintings), we get tender hues of soft, almost translucent
colors. These hues appeared to me like the fleeting rouge of a kiss or
a fingerprint. Like the untouchable, far-off blue of the sky. Like the
orange of a wing of a butterfly that has disappeared already, that has
left only the trace of orange in our memory. Or is it the faint orange
glow of a flame, the flaming orange of the sun seen behind closed eyelids?
And yet, more tender - more fragile, more evasive and evanescent. There
are other colors and their combined appearance, in the midst of a white
surface, reminded another artist of the colors of a glass
window in a church. The colors of Gerhard Richter's glass windows in Cologne,
perhaps. I can only wonder if there are other, even more bewitching parallels
to be found.
In contrast to the softness and evasiveness characteristic
of the appearance of this non-monochrome panel flanked by monochrome whiteness,
the other non-monochrome panel, with its minute splashes as well as the
clusters of blacks and colors that appear before its white surface,
shows "patterns" of the print produced by a machine, rather than painted
colors.
Here, without doubt, the starting point is again, directly
or indirectly, an image of the reproduced book mentioned above. Perhaps
Luc departed from a result of a transformation process (or of transformation
processes) that had lead him to a work of the earlier Hortus series. Perhaps
he again departed from a book image. It is clear that large xerox copies
of a plate reproduced in the book grant very coarse deformations of theoretically
regular dots that make up dark spaces in a reproduction. They stand out
before a white surface or background. If colors are added, by digital manipulation,
several prints superimposed on each other may grant black as well as colored
dots and splashes. It seems, in fact, that the large, then further
enlarged points of dpi dots were blown up to a size a hundred or a thousand
fold their 'original' size - if it is still permissible to speak of an
original and an original size.
Looking at it, I see black blobs. Blots. Splashes of
black flowing into each other. And as I imagine "realities" appearing inside
and behind and by way of them, they are transformed, it seems, into a human
figure emerging from out of a void. A whiteness, a cloud, a mist. And thus,
there it is: deciphered, guessed, searchingly grasped and questioned again
- the figure, perhaps, of a great nude. Her face slightly raised. Her arms
at her side. The legs slightly crossed. The breasts bulging. The magical
nest as if stressed by one of the four white squares that are positioned,
one above the other, leaving equal spaces between them. Rhythmically accentuating
the visual space of the work...
The entire space of this panel, with its blacks with its
turquoise greens the accentuation of a black outline, seems as if studded
with colored snowflakes, pastel colors: light pinks, blues, yellows, faint
bluegreens, orange colors.
The music of these 'snowflakes,' these 'notes' on a sheet
of music (that is covered, we know, with black dots and splashes as well)
appears to permeate the emptiness of the surrounding white visual space
with an air of hilarious, happy nonchalance, freshness, an unconscious
happy-go-lucky mood of being in love, or being finally free. It's the sensation,
to me, of having thrown off chains, having shed gloomy memories. Having
freed one's self, that is, from the unnecessary and the much-too-rational
and calculated. But also the irrational. From all, perhaps, that is oppressive
and that is characteristic of the narrow-minded egotism and hunger for
power and wealth and "love that money can buy" which are so typical of
our present societies.
If I choose to read Asparagus 3 from left to right
(which is not untypical in most Western societies since the time we read
books where words are printed horizontally, from left to right), the computer
print on the left panel just 'described' sets the starting note. And from
here, the eyes wanders and rests in the serene and warm emptiness of cream-white.
And it wanders further, to the music of near-transparent hues, their bewitching
colors dancing in the whiteness, floating in the white 'air' or above a
white 'ground.' And then, again, the rhythm of our wandering eyes
carries us further, again into soft warm cream-white and the music fades
out or we scan back to the beginning, and the dance, the music, begins
anew.
The work, with its composition of print and paintings,
of monochrome spaces and white spaces featuring colors and forms (and blacks,
too, in the case of the print) breathes a freedom that is rarely found
these days. It is open to the most diverse readings, and yet it is part
of a tradition thousands of years old, a tradition that goes back as far
as Chinese landscape painting, Classical painting, that is, with its integrated,
free and open white space that gives so much room to the imagination and
that is also filled with silence, a void, in other words, that mystery
which had to wait for composers like Isang Yun and John Cage, in order
to be discovered once again. Luc Piron has brought this to light, he has
made it apparent in a work that is clearly and rationally structured and
that is nonetheless intuitive, confronting the secret of reality, and teaching
our eyes to again feel and think.
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