From New Figuration to Gestural Art

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Translated from French by  Kathleen Prendergast

"Le Marionnetiste" Huile sur toile (100/120) 1988 (BXL coll. part.)

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Art goes beyond its old boundaries Art has no final frontier; a melting-pot of styles, very little of the work produced nowadays is definable in the traditional language of art history - and now that artists, churches and patrons have given up imposing outmoded restrictions, we hardly need art critics and artistic institutions to tell us what to do. Art in constant revolution The rate at which art is evolving is faster than ever. This makes it easier for artists who are not clear about what they are trying to achieve to look back and try to understand their work in the context of what has gone before. This needs to be more than just an exercise in superficial labelling. For example, a true neoexpressionist must understand the relationship between art and language if his art is to go anywhere beyond the crude and static; there needs to be a symbiotic interdependence of ideas. But since by no means all art fits into such conventional categories, we must be constantly on the look-out for true individuality.

 "As a child, building pathetic, ephemeral chapels with sand and fragments of brightly coloured glass, a kaleidoscope of light was etched into my mind. It made the greyness of the North intolerable. When I was taken to the high valleys of the Var and saw the explosive brilliance of that sunlight, I realised where my future lay. Years later, visiting the Gorges of the Verdon with a friend, I relived that same sensory shock I first experienced in the 50s in the nearby Gorges of the Cians."

"Visage" huile sur toile (70/60)          Théâtre Atelier 1971

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I recall my first drawings, done on my knees on the old floor of the family general store; I would get expensive aniline crayons from the teaching supplies shelf, and lick them with the tip of my tongue to produce a thick line. The attic of my father's workshop was both a store-room and playroom for my brothers and cousins, and in one corner was my junk-shop of a "studio" - where I was all too often interrupted. I did not have to put up with this for long. I realised the importance of my own creative space and the search for a proper workplace became crucial. During the period from 1968 to 1973 - the years of hippies, the Vietnam war and free expression - I was demobilised from the army because of problems with my legs. I got married and became a father. Although I started painting again in the attic of a small house rented to us cheaply by a friend's mother, my life would never be the same again. At that time I wanted my painting to be a pure fusion of light and matter. But I just couldn't avoid painting figuratively however powerfully its opposite appealed to me. Only much later - when I discovered the works of Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feiniger and others - did I start to see my work as a form of neoexpressionism".

In 1973 Desiro had an exhibition at the Fourneau St Michel during the "Theatre of the Ardennes" festival. He produced the posters for Antonin Artaud's play Van Gogh, Society's Suicide, and for a production by Franck Venaille at Paris' Théâtre de la Cité Internationale. His participation in the production of Alain D'Hooghe's film Prototype Culinaire and his exhibition of drawings in black felt-tip at the gallery Le Quai contributed to his "contradictory, parallel membership" of the Conceptual movement - the genuineness of his commitment in no way mitigated by his caustic humour.
The following year, the Conceptual architects held a press conference and published their manifesto at St-Luc in Liège. The same year Desiro organised an "auto-da-fé" in the forests of Ardenne and broke off relations with the Théâtre d'Ambly.
The International Association of Art Critics held its inaugural meeting in 1977 at the "Documenta" art festival in Kassel, West Germany. At the Yellow gallery in Liège, Desiro met the poet Georges Linze who produced the catalogue for the exhibition Gears and Machines. He also met Jean-Louis Nyst and Jacques Lizène, "the little master of Liège". But Desiro's work remained largely unknown; and those who knew it did not like it, clashing as it did with the well-oiled 70s artistic scene.

With its various strands constantly evolving, Conceptual art was building bridges between art and language. Indefinably, indescribably, it linked logic, mathematics and science; yet it remained truly sui generis. With existential ingenuity, it debunked more ritualistic forms of expression and took art beyond its conventional limits. At the same time, however, there was an enormous backlash against its intellectualism, and some artists were returning to more primal, uncontrolled, impulsive approaches.

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"Fanfare métaphysique"  Étude à la mine de plomb 1974

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1974-1979, black and "Conceptual" period "Apparently I talked about doing these drawings with my own blood - a youthfully impetuous exaggeration seized on by some journalists. Mind you I took some pleasure in the way this kind of thing darkened my public image. In the eyes of some critics I will remain the black (sic) artist who "wants to fire at society's ship at point-blank range" - as though that was all it would take to sink it! Happily it was also the time I discovered other like-minded artists and made some lasting friendships. From the first exhibitions, which had mentally exhausted me, all that remained was a bitter after-taste, but a new page had now been turned. Nonetheless old images kept coming into my mind, reminiscences of the past which I could not repress. Melancholic art was only a concept, a stage I had to go through, the logical consequence of suffering and revolt. A return to nature and simplicity would be the best restorative, but there was a price to pay, a kind of expiatory sacrifice, an auto-da-fé.

Sérigraphie 1973

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In the artwork for the invitation card to an exhibition at the Rose Traversée gallery, in the Brussels métro, Desiro warns us of the dangers of a robotized world. The human brain is partially opened to reveal that it has been taken over by a bizarre machine. Controlled by a clever arrangement of gears, resistors and lamps, the man has lost his freedom to act. His own machine has taken him over. But he can still react - which is why this head (the artist's own) has undergone only a partial metamorphosis. The Belgian poet Georges Linze wrote the following preface to an exhibition catalogue: "Our merit lies in the interpretation of our times (Shakespeare). And Saint-Just: Anything which is not new in a time of innovation is pernicious. So Jean-Pol Desiro is spot on. He is here to witness and record. Today man seems dominated by the machines he has created. So here is machine-man, a robot caught up in its own wheels and cogs. Desiro's perception reaches into pain, which gives his art a slightly barbaric aspect. But it is no more than a message of anguish. There is distress in these works and their humour can seem grating. But if they irritate, all the better. Nothing is worse than indifference. Jacques Parisse, of the newspaper La Wallonie rightly said that Desiro offers a bitter diagnosis of the despiritualisation of our society. But we are at the beginning of a new age and Desiro does well to show us its monsters and warn us of its dangers. Besides, it is the duty of the artist to listen to the secret utterances of the living world. And the bottom line is that he is always right"

"La mère Michelle"  Acrylique sur toile  1980

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In 1980 Desiro took a surprise turn with what he calls his "Fairground Period" - extravagant and even farcical pictures which seem like parodies of certain great artists: comic and grotesque works essentially inferior to those of the previous period. There is, however, a certain continuity with what he was already doing, for if the Art-Language relationship is the primary concern of Conceptual art, pastiche and the grotesque are also part of the formula. "Desiro's surrealism is bizarre", wrote one badly informed columnist, "he gets his techniques from Naïve art, Symbolism and famous painters of the past, but without seeming to plagiarise or to pay homage". From this point his art goes into counterpoint, a to and fro parallelism of periods. And he is troubled by the apparent contradictions. In anticipation of his Geometric period he feels a need to be alone. He has a studio built at the end of his garden, a five by five metre hideaway erected on the site of an old coal-shed. "[...] A virgin place into which I could inject something new, that's what I needed to renew my inspiration, that was the purpose of this retreat. I spent all my time working on big geometric gouaches using the Surrealist technique of automatism. Ensembles of interlocking forms in chaotic but harmonious perspective; balanced expanses of uniform colour; soft ochre, yellow and green monochromes; they were the visible correlates of an unknown life, a world of strange mineral, microbial and vegetable forms, seen through the living microscope of my eye. I was the bard of a new poetry extolling the glory of science. The freshness, the novelty of these paintings did not escape me, but I continued my search for a more personal form of expression based on characters from the Commedia dell'Arte".

Was Desiro trying to enlarge the microcosm of "artistic fashion" by introducing the idea of creative parallelisms with multiple temporalities? And might there even be some link with quantum mechanics? The artist's new images did seem more technical and industrial, pushed towards the uniformity of certain artists who were sacrificing everything to Conceptual art and to galleries wanting to turn a fast buck. Although he was fully aware of these forces at work, he never destroyed a single part of the mosaic which would enable us to reconstruct his entire artistic journey.

"Géométrie poétique", détail, gouache sur carton (210/140) Coll. part. France 1979

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We can regard the apparent incoherence of the neo-avantgarde as enriching; a kind of experimentation, research and movement capable of bringing art to life. Desiro's first travel sketchbooks contain beautiful Indian ink mythological pastiches involving the Dioscuri attending the birth of Athena, and such characters as Paris, Achilles and the Centaurs. All these scenes are imbued with his unique vision, culminating in the astonishing Les Grandes Dyonisies, an oil on canvas measuring 200 x 170 cm, in which the central painting is framed by smaller pictures. Here you see Chronos vomiting out his children and Bellerophon killing the Chimera: it was painted during 1984-1985 and the impression of creative parallelism of multiple temporalities is irresistible: a veritable prophecy before the dawning of the third millenium. "One must be nomadic", as Francis Piccabia said, "traversing ideas just as one travels through countries or towns". Sometimes chance plays a decisive role in the way a journey proceeds.

"Tribunal de dernière instance" 
178x140 Acrylique sur toile

He is undoubtedly a Conceptual painter, if at the margins of the movement, and the visual discomfort he provokes with his series of double images prompts a reconsideration of his painting in the context of multiples and of new supports and media. The linkage of culture with artistic creation is not fortuitous but both necessary and inevitable, just like the back of a canvas which can be the subject of a painting as well as its support. And his subsequent experiments start moving in the direction of virtual art, even if the processes are rather different and there is an air of absurdity.

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"La rumeur" huile sur toile (60/70) 1988 (coll. particulière)

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In the picture La Rumeur (The Rumour) (oil on canvas 70 x 60 cm) someone is running in front of Picasso's picture Les Demoiselles dAvignon. This work prompts the question: did it happen? But if, since Cézanne, we have understood that objective reality does not exist, perhaps things are only ever a matter of framing, angle and viewpoint. There is an end to the purging of Minimalism and Conceptualism, with the knowledge that there is no compulsion either towards or away from figurative painting. So why do the intelligentsia obstinately insist on having pictures before their eyes? Are the defenders of painting retrograde or literary romantics? Painting is only a siding in the railway of experimentation, and perhaps there will soon be nothing left but installations to appeal to the artistic intelligentsia. But in the current visual chaos of media, only paintings seem capable of true sensitivity.                                        "Les baigneuses de Sidé" Acrylique sur toile                                     (coll. particulière)

"Peinture accordéon" Acrylique sur bois Double face (Coll. particulière) (70/70) 1989

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In 1998 for the first time Desiro installed his Mobil Picture Cubes at the Vrieden van Gente Kunstmarkt in Gent (Belgium). It consisted of four cubes covered with painted synthetic canvas and supported on a clear polystyrene surface on invisible nylon balls. The painted faces were linked as in a children's game. When they were manipulated in a prescribed manner they revealed post-cubist motifs. A virtual image was reflected in a concave mirror across a table carried on four wooden pyramids. Thus the image transcended space at the speed of light.

In 1990 Mobil Picture Cubes was installed in Paris along with the first remote controlled painting: a lightweight structure covered with painted canvases on a contraption with four remotely controlled wheels. This "Mobile Art" as it was called in Paris was the product of a challenge to artists put out on 18 June 1990 to explore and confront new techniques from the applied sciences.

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Avant-projet du "Mobile Pictures cubes" 1989

Desiro went to the Park of Vincennes taking, in a small case, some of his latest projects sketched out in booklets of Vangerow's paper. This led to Philips International offering him the loan of a laser gun capable of cutting into all kinds of substance. After six months of experimentation the company bought his best pieces and offered him a stay at their luxurious property in Monaco. But Desiro turned this down. He finished the series of canvases Art and Space - which was to win him the New Figuration prize in Cannes - and embarked upon a voyage of self-questioning around the Caribbean.

"Jaune" huile sur toile (100/80) (Collection d'État) 1991

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From New Figuration; for Gestural Painting. The end of one decade and the start of another: a time to reconsider Desiro's work, evaluate it and look towards the future, a time to look at his latest ideas and consider where they are leading. The series Art and Space was derived from the Codex - concrete ideas sketched in black ink. From a universal, cosmic principle, the beginning of the nineties saw Desiro producing a form of Gestural painting, a prolific output, based on books of studies, such as the Artists Diary (see below). The style was influenced by art from the beginning of the century, although the artist was still a free agent. He was enthusiastically getting himself involved in pictorial painting again, producing work both idealistic and pragmatic, full of power and energy. 30 April 1991: "I've finished the sketchbook of gouaches called "Côte d'Azur" and the first book of Genesis, this is refreshing, strong, dynamic painting: a return to basics, and to poetry". The second sketchbook is followed by 32 acrylics on 36x56 cm card, and some free interpretations on large canvases (Sodom, acrylic 200 x 158 cm, Separation of the Elements, acrylic 200 x 158 cm) based on early passages from the Old Testament.

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On Christmas eve 1991 he at last completed the picture Red, Yellow, Blue (oil on canvas, 80 x 150 cm). He then set to work on the 1992 Artists Diary - overpainting Edward Hopper's Bar in New York City, on the 19 October page, with a project Yellow. The 19 January page, Paul Cézanne's birthday, is painted with a study for the painting The King amuses himself. The double page devoted to the golden age of the style of Manuel I (King of Portugal) is the background of the study for The kicking-up-the-arse machine, inspired on 20 April by the declaration of war in Bosnia. Thus each day of the year had its famous painter overpainted with a Desiro original according to the preoccupations of the moment, with his annotations between the lines of the original text. Wherever he roamed the diary was his travel book and constant companion. It was a veritable cornucopia of new ideas which years later continued to inspire new works. On Page 7 he overpainted a Picasso reproduction with a sketch for the work called Fusion which was eventually painted in 1996 in his studio in the rue du Parc. Painted in acrylics with sweeping strokes of the pallet knife, reds, yellows and oranges are balanced against the background of the raw linen canvas by ochres and blues which add to the work's violence. It suggests raging blast furnaces or a huge boat run aground without there being any specific detail pointing to either interpretation.

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Noir rouge jaune bleu. 1992 (158x100)

Often, however, there is a less ambiguous message in Desiro's work. His wild installation of white parallelepipeds made up of personal catalogues - at the time of the 1992 Kassel Documenta festival - was a clear comment on the strained relationships in the official world of contemporary art.

Coyright 2006. Artur Desiro. http://www.desiroartgalerie.net