NEW ORPHISM. | GUILLAUME PATUREL.
By Goënièvre Anaïs
http://quietlunch.com/new-orphism-guillaume-paturel/
URBAN UTOPIAS ON CANVAS WOOD.
When light takes root in Gowanus
Then, drift off unknown oceans …
Guillaume Paturel’s adventure in painting begins in the heart of Brooklyn’s historic industrial district, Gowanus, a few years ago. Along the canal, iron skeletons lie in the water, calderian accumulations of waste punctuate the landscape, constantly modifying it. The study of plans for his work as an architect and the daily observation of the ballet of the cranes mark him deeply and orient his artistic approach. Today, these visual memories are linked to the Atlantic mist and the constant variations of the sky over Manhattan.
He exhibited at the Fragmental Museum, in Queens (curator: Guy Reziciner), at the One Art Space in Manhattan and at the gallery A + E (curator Frederique Dessemond – Ginette NY, jewellery designer) in Manhattan. He is preparing a new solo-show for the month of March in Lower East Side.
PARIS WITH CIRCLES. | ACRYLIC ON WOOD. | 47.64″ X 71.65″, 2016.
From unknown silence, the matter wells up, unfolds and then becomes organized. The thunder’s vibrant embossment. We distinguish between the clouds, the silver foam from the terrestrial horizons: the feast of the world. With Guillaume Paturel, the eyes swallow “the solemn geographies of human limits” – Paul Eluard. In the well of the canvas, Paturel digs the abstract memory of history’s colors : the flowers’ gist that reborn a thousand times and the evanescent stars’ energy … Underground, sub-canvas, marvel at the red rising from an unsuspected river. Outbreak of the pictorial event. The artist carves, in the leaves of a black gold, the flickering temple of our migrating cities : Black Series 01, Paris with Circles…He transfigures the architectural data into a pleiad of matrix cells: fishes shoals secretly gathered, original symphony’s nucleuses, scattered and choreographed flakes slipping on the dress of the continents.
SOLAR. | ACRYLIC COLLAGE & CARVING ON WOOD. | 69.29″ X 74.80″, 2015.
With Solar, Paturel stares the jolts of a renewed Orphism. Let us remember the words of Frantisek Kupka: “My painting, abstract? Why ? Painting is concrete: color, shapes, dynamics. What counts is the invention. One must invent and then build.” At the beginning of the 20th century, the french poet Apollinaire extends a wire between Robert & Sonia Delaunay’s solar cubism and Orpheus, his poem with the “luminous language”. In the rayonist cave of matter’s decomposition into energetic bundles, artists weave their understanding of the world. Painting, since then, cuts out, with the magnifying glass, the quintessence of the movement. Today, many painters continue this research, in view of socio-cultural, political and geographical strong problematics. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mark Bradford’s collages bear witness to this: Bread and Circuses executed in 2007. Bradford and Paturel share this fascination with cities, their carvings, and archeology.
Interpret with the heart’s hands, the sun we populate. Force will be to inhabit the light in communion with the wave announcing creative gesture.
“I have not the feeling that my paintings are cheerful, I even find them quite dark and tragic! For me, they contain an energy: the fight of colors. It is primarily the idea of a battle, of contradictory movements confronting one another. Just as the borders of countries that are under pressure. These are the pressures I am trying to show. The elements, inside a painting, must remain mobile, in circulation …
My paintings always have several readings and even vary according to the hours of the day… So, it’s difficult to choose titles. If this morning “blue” is the answer for one, few days later, an other word comes. Soulages has found an escape: no title. I think about it…”–Guillaume Paturel
By the third oedipal eye, the artist reproduces the anamorphoses of his augmented vision. And the painted picture erects a repair. Dislocated lotus’s scales for a single ship. Enchanted phalanstary with flowing wings. Underwater Zeppelin. Emergency utopias for the bruised peoples. When the oceans rise and collapse on neighboring empires, the artist mends the urban fabric. He reestablishes the vestiges and, under the sand, unveils, by timeless fragments, the possible existences. How to renovate paradise since its deafening?
58. | ACRYLIC & CARVING ON WOOD. | 69.29 X 74.80″, 2016.
The artist works towards that and gives birth to landscapes with multiple fantasy whorls. Its dynamic fables scatter fluid vortices, impetuous reefs, organic cavities.
“We must redeem the world through beauty: beauty of gesture, of innocence, of sacrifice, of the ideal.”
– François Cheng
Was not this also the source of Alberto Burri’s project in Gibbelina, in Sicily? While the city is engulfed by an earthquake the artist explores, in the pictorial thickness, the cracking of the earth in monochromes – with strong touches – until intervening on the ruins of the city, in covering with a white cement the walls of the original streets. Land art or land of reverence … Sometimes, when architecture enters into communion with painting, the piece of art, suddenly, restores the visible’s field.
There is in the paintings of Guillaume Paturel, a remarkable synthesis of a thousand identifiable writings. Inheritances. He borrows from the ancient Chinese techniques, the science of the Breath which caresses, with a stroke of claw, the porous soils of the canvas. Its variations of gray invoke the density of Anselm Kieffer’s works, strata bending under the weight of the past. Regarding modern and contemporary art, the philosopher Lyotard noted: “The works of painting, sculpture, architecture and literature are worth nothing as answers to nihilism, they are all worth as questions posed to nothingness.” Often the lower part of Paturel’s paintings gives way to strokes full of water, a heavy rain which flows in straight lines as if to reveal the plot of the projected actions. We can think of Bomb Island, Black Curtain or Cobourg 3 +1 more, paintings by Peter Doig, dating back to the 1990s.
Painting, as music, has this ineffable virtue: to wander in immensity, to infinity. Does not the substance of expression belong to the power of creating a place? And from its observation shore, the spectator activates the vibration. In 2012, in an interview, Richard Serra confides: “All I can say is that there is a lot of unbearable lightness and entertainment in art. It is a lightness which does not root you, and which is content to clean everything in its passage.” A work is an adventure, a breathing, an innate experience.