Exposición "Pasa la vida" Michel Mouffe

The Passing of Life

 

No one escapes this feeling of having one day arrived at a decisive crossroads in life, and chosen to take one path rather than the other, and thus, having seen life escaping from a road that seemed to be traced differently.

 

Formentera became my place of life after many adventures, like so many mini miracles. These few years of painting in my studio near the cliff have developed a significant impact on my work.

 

Among other things, Passa la vida relates these influences through a selected series of paintings from recent years, all of them attached to a form of vision. Because painting affirms to be art, an interpretative and personal vision, an expressive vision that painting carries beyond words when it suspends time and experiences itself in the here and now of the exhibition.

 

And seeing becomes living! (love would not be far) and living becomes seeing.

Born in painting at the moment of its rejection – the painting has nothing more to say! everything has been done! l'art c'est fini, etc… –  I tried to return to the basic constituents of painting, to reconsider them, to approach other limits, other frontiers, starting with the frame that underlies the canvas. It was a poorly made chassis from the beginning that gave the idea. It distorted the surface and added an extra dimension to the space created.

 

Since then, I have been making my frames. I have replaced the wooden crosses that hold them with a metal structure; it pushes the canvas outwards and deforms it. The frame, like the surface of the painting, is transformed, and the pictorial space multiplied. The application of superimposed layers of fluid and transparent colors, and intermittent sanding, contribute to establishing a particular vision of the surface, a flat depth. This form of oxymoron suits the work; the paintings are surfaces but also objects, and the painting, in its depths, appears flat and monochrome. It is this in-between that is targeted, as a new visibility, both spirituality and cosmogony. Painting becomes the being of painting, it is flesh, and skin sacrificed by time, and time brings the crossroads.

 

It was an encounter that immersed me in the history of the island, of the Civil War, which gave name to the series, A las cinco de la tarde, so many paintings which allowed me to develop the portrait, and therefore, figuration and further, the question of how we see.

It is from the morning greeting at the cliff and the impermanence of the spectacle —lights, mists, and colors — that the idea of the (Nebel) series was born. The series is dedicated to a temporal posture — only one, see two layers of color are applied — to establish the surface at its maximum level of spatial expression within an absolute restriction of means.

 

It is the arrival of migrants, that this time reactivated my work, which interacts between photography and painting in the equivocal form of small paintings coated with wax.

It is from the series mentioned above — work creates work — which was two years ago at the origin of the series In Between where, in the pictorial space, two protuberances appear. These paintings depict the visual relationships between these two entities, playing on their appearance/disappearance according to the angle of vision. They offer an analogy to quantum physics by the simultaneous presence/absence of the underlying traces.

Finally, it is the Black series that today animates this journey, approaching the vision by what veils it, hides it, blocks it, what to see there?

 

By aligning and commenting on the titles of these Formenterian series, A las cinco de la tarde, Nebel, In Between and Black, I see the era behind the genius of the place, the intensity of the era.

 

Michel Mouffe, Formentera 14.02.2023