Preface

We are each under an edge of the sky.

The invitation made by Ningbo Museum of Art provides an opportunity for me to show for the first time, outside my country, a substantial series of my artworks. This group consists of the last two series of paintings I have made since 2006 over the last ten years.

For an artist, to have the privilege to present such an overview is also an opportunity to take a look at their own approach. So this is what I will also try to do in this text. One could say that an artist is in no position to talk about himself in his work, because he is biased and lacks the necessary distance in relation to it. This is largely true.

However what may be interesting about such a text is that it could be written to produce something from inside the work. Text as a form of speech that would be closer to the path of the paintings, with uncertainties and doubts, success and failures. And in my opinion, these failures, can often lead to success.

It’s difficult to ignore that this text can also be seen as a letter to another culture, a civilization that is different from mine, that I regret I don’t yet know very well. A civilization of painters who, in the West are inscribed in mysterious, singular and imperfect ways in the imagination. This text is also an address, a sort of letter that forces me to talk like a traveler who speaks of his journey and where he comes from.

I start now by talking about the title of this exhibition. I must admit that I still have difficulty finding titles and these paintings have none. There are often here simple references composed of initials and numbers. Somehow I fear that a title encloses the painting’s image and meaning and takes both its own freedom and that of the viewer.

To find the title of this exhibition was particularly difficult because, as I wrote previously, it covers ten years of work and consists of two large groups of paintings. And indeed I sought to connect these two bodies of work. I looked for simple words that can help to grasp the paintings made over those ten years.

There are images of disorder, multitude and mass that attach to the series of monochromes and those of origin, beginnings and rough sketches for the more recent ones. Both sets will match and complement each other, like two tracks that run on opposite sides but go to the same place.However this direction was not enough in itself. So I read poetry, especially classical Chinese poetry that I didn’t know very well. To search for some words to say or suggest what I didn’t know how to. And when I read the following verse I knew that it expressed what remains so obscure for me.

We are each at an edge of the sky.

Here is the idea or feeling of an open but solid space, and in soiltude these paintings are like worlds, at the beginning, in the here-and-now, in a place where time and space are confused or mixed. Standing at the edge, not near the center of things, elements circulate through vast movements, as does the sky.

I spoke earlier of the paintings in this exhibition as two sets that match and complement each other, like the image of two paths going to the same place.

This is the place where language takes shape, here it is the language of Painting. I say, but I don’t think that paint is ‘organized like a language’, that may be why it can be pre-lingual and therefore begins to show what is before it. To show what is pre-lingual is above all to show the desire of language, a contained energy that wants to transmit but does not yet know how to.

With the monochromes, there are in fact no limits, each painting can only function as an instant, framing the apparent disorder. This dispersed memory that contains the effects of the paint, lines, spots, spills, curves, are reunited in a field of color. From amongst the chaos, one color is chosen, adjusted and diluted, to produce the many different consistencies and densities. The task is to find a place in this disorder, to produce a solid flow, to begin to balance this unsteadiness.

If I come back to this notion of language or that which precedes it, this particular language is disarticulated and disjointed, and its words are juxtaposed, superimposed. Yet there are connections. I want to make in this uncertain, chaotic district: a togetherness.

I feel like a writer, completeing one chapter, then the next one can often be in reverse, like a mirror. After the Monochromes, I wanted to reassemble all the colors in one fragment of space. I Imagine multi-colored painted fragments put in a place then agglomerating on only a part of the canvas. In these spaces or places of color the lines are actuated as drawing.The action of drawing never ends, even when the paint on each loaded the brush is exhausted. Each line eventually expires into the white surface of the canvas.

I like it how the natural steps in the painting are reversed, what starts with color then ends up as drawing. These paintings act as a moment between what is planned and chance, between accident and necessity. To show that energy from the beginning, is in the colors and the sketched lines that are just put-there. From this uncertainty between decisiveness and disorientation, I want to produce a contrast between color density and lightness of drawing. It is this contrast that made me call this group of paintings, "a lot of a little - a little of a lot" which explains that each painting is referenced by BppB initials (beaucoup de peu, peu de beaucoup).

Obviously, much of Western Abstract Painting is held in the research of the elements of painting itself. And I situate myself in the continuity of this story, that detaches from representation in a move towards autonomy. My path in this story probably puts me at that particular moment between making a decision and uncertainty. And I hope to make of this disarray, a decisive energy.

At the time of this writing, I know which paintings will go to China but not how they will be hung. It can change. But in these two series of paintings facing each other, shown in the wonderful space of the muséum, two simple gestures thrive in these paintings and through cultures and time : to gather and disperse.

That is to say, to know… alone standing under an edge of the sky.

Jérôme Boutterin,

Paris – Ningbo, April 2016.

Hosted by:

Ningbo Museum of Art

Co-organizer:

France Jinlise Culture & Communication

Cooperative Partners:

France Consulate General in Shanghai

Faguowenhua.com

France Foreign Culture and Education Bureau

Alliance Française

Time:

5 May 2016 - 31 May 2016

Location:

No. 3 Hall