Through the torn curtain of dreams

            In its desire not to represent anything, is modern painting not in danger of sliding unconsciously into the most absolute representation? It would not be the first, nor the last, time that modernity finds itself in the most paradoxical of situations, caught as it were in the trap of its own radicality. Judging by certain recent examples, it is even possible to maintain that if modernism has, as they say, got rid of representation, its more or less conscious goal was perhaps to arrive at last at true representation, by breaking the ambiguity which the word “imitation” has always been accompanied in our traditional culture. For in our world, for at least two millennia, the artist has willy-nilly “imitated reality”, in the process making it either more beautiful or (in recent years) uglier. But -- inevitable question -- what is reality?

            Let us start with the principle that to refuse representation is to refuse to “imitate” the “subject” (or the “object”) “outwardly”. This would open the way to “imitate” it “inwardly”. But what, then, is “inwardly”?

            One undoubted merit (among many) of Elisabeth Poiret’s pictorial/plastic oeuvre is that it helps us progress in our meditation on this question: a question which today preoccupies artists and critics alike, even when they appear to be thinking of something else. For at first sight Elisabeth Poiret’s paintings -- or rather, pictorial-plastic objects -- make the spectator in search of familiar landmarks think of “abstraction”: these “objects’” extreme freedom compared to any “real” models makes them into profoundly independent beings. The line as pure élan -- a cutting energy -- and the color (or rather, the tint, the texture) as vibrant surface -- a deployed energy -- insolently destroy external dependency, and find in themselves -- for the line in its spring, for the surface in its flight -- the food for their life and development. And yet, when we look at them more closely, we get a feeling of extraordinary expressiveness. And more: the feeling of a “déjà-vu”: seen before, but where? in what intensely private and ephemeral order of reality? An order so profound, so subtle, that only abstraction, surely, can explore it.

            Perhaps, to approach credibly the ambiguity of these “objects”, we might employ (but with great discipline and care) the Freudian technique of mental association. Used with proper care, this “game” would at least allow us to find terms to perceive and formulate the underlying principle which gives these objects such an immense intensity of life.

The paintings: the dream-gates ajar

            First, the paintings. Let us choose from among them one typical canvas -- it might be called “Mandala”, and its powerful presence is in part due to the clarity, the rigor of acrylic. The great expanse of intense black which vertically divides the surface in two makes of the other part a movement that resembles a reddening fire; it seems to push -- or lower -- into this fire, on our left, a dense sphere bent upon a course which might propel it out of the frame. The mixture of opacity and inner light at work in the texture of this sphere, the impression that its skin, stretched, torn by the angles of an internal square, is yielding on all sides, evoke an eyeball saturated with visions and rolling in(to) sleep. The Eye, immemorial symbol of the Spirit, abandons its daylight watch, like a sinking sun; the reds of the gaping space below the threshold prepare to enfold it. And so the frame, outworn convention as it is, here gets back -- thanks to that clever opening  wedged between the black expanse and the border on the left -- its dignity of being apparitions’ window and the cellar out of which rise the lights of the spirit. There is a word which might describe this atmosphere of a threshold crossed, where terrors and delights appear and mingle -- a word with a scientific sound, unfortunately, but with an everyday meaning because it refers to a common experience: a “hypnagogic” dream, i.e. a series of mental representations, already dreamlike, which fill our consciousness at the very moment of sinking into sleep: the remains of the day, the memory rags of recent perceptions, float and change shape, forms becoming textures, clouds, windowlights, scattered lineaments, scraps of read or heard phrases, a dance of chaos into which the world of external reality is decomposing: an uncontrolled, undisciplined representationality which continually mixes and stirs the world of its external sources and of its dependency. 

The inks: crossing the threshold

            The inks, now, entitled “Dédicaces” [dedications]. As we have seen, the paintings managed to break free of the external representation and at the same time of the abstract. The other experiment, that of the inks, recreates and deepens the miracle of the most abstract turning (in)to the most expressive. All the powers offered here by the material’s fluidity -- its capacity for dilution or concentration, for being washed to the point of dissolution or to be collected in vapors, and especially of surpassing (not imitating) the celestial magma: blocks that dissipate, sheets that soil, cracks that widen -- the whole range of its special vitality, in fact, is here exploited with an extraordinary virtuosity, in a kind of magnificent stubbornness that here attains another limit of the abstract, the art of pure energy, which in the history of modern art set itself to dethroning the geometric, and which has since achieved its goal. But here again, for the spectator capable of being drawn in beyond the sheer élan which follows the pleasure of exhaustion, there arises the strong impression that what Hugo called an “inward eye” is struggling to tear the veil: an “eye” impatient to go beyond the threshold of sleep, fascinated by the simultaneous breadth and evanescence of the subconscious’s mirages, obsessed by the immense and universal radiance at the end. A radiance  constantly tarnished, soiled by the curtain’s windblown rags -- a filter that is always lacerated and always tough. And then, before the strange stagnation created by the torn veil’s invincibility, doubt comes in: doubt of the so-called depth of the self: might that self not , when all is said and done, be a threshold opening on the void? Might the glimpsed radiance not merely be the trace left by the blackness removed? Here, indeed, is a “déjà-vu” that constantly walks in our day-to-day memory: when our mind explores our self, in dreams or in waking, but also when it sounds another’s self, it often cannot help ruminating the bitterness of the void.

The terra-cottas: the pleasure of the unachieved

If the inks dwell on a threshold which makes us lift up our heads -- the art of energy in exploration mode is like meteorological disturbances and calls up the “skies torn like beaches” beloved by Baudelaire -- the terra-cottas remind us of the immemorial dreams of abysses opening beneath our feet: literally the sub-conscious, the “below-conscious”, communicating with the superconscious, also a term from psychoanalysis. These squares are, in the most ordinary sense, paving-stones. Even if we see them here raised upright like windows, the memories of walking they call up in the beholder, and especially their very special texture -- ocher with all its shades: from washed, almost scraped, yellow to a harsh, impure orange -- inevitably suggest the original clay. The artist here knocks on yet another door, as if the conquest of sleep’s citadel demanded finding another exit once a first one is refused. And if the charms of the hypnagogic mirage are here undoubtedly renewed, it is because here once again the material’s very nature not only wants to be seen but determines the manner of the underground exploration: the roughnesses, the irregularities of the trodden-upon terra-cotta in their own way bring back the memory fragments of daytime life; to strengthen this impression of yesterday’s passing traces, the artist uses other materials that heighten the reliefs and the tints already present, or that produce, by the specificity of their weight and color, effects of contrast: deep wounds or reliefs in the original matter, scorings -- significantly, these additions have shapes not yet identifiable -- lacerated squares of colors that recall fabric, traces of a hieroglyphic alphabet, fragments of musical scores, which reminds us that memory is like an attic floor...... But the ambiguity of form and matter orients the manner of exploration always beyond the memory of what is “external”: the “impacts”, generally dark in tone, from outside, actually modify the perception of the basic texture (ocher and terra-cotta); this texture takes on a more diluted, more vaporous substance; and the tendency to mass the lightest tones, even to white, in the squares’ center accentuates the sense of plunging-in, as if the beholder’s mind saw itself sucked into the square’s mass now become a tunnel, a gaping. Thus again is a threshold created, and a new journey is begun: the concrete become dust suspended is another way of opening dream’s door, and this time one that sweeps aside the curtain’s folds. Shall we at last attain the beyond-world of consciousness? At first it seems as if -- as with the the half-open entry of the paintings and with the mirage-threshold of the inks -- the chthonic stuff which receives the beholder who plunges into the pictorial space conceals another trap: taking him into its magma it deprives him of landmarks, it takes away his power to say if he is advancing or merely going in circles. Is this a hermetic frontier, like an invisible but unbreakable glass, or is it the anteroom of a new nowhere? The beholder’s consciousness now feels the impact, through and beyond these inscribed dilemmas, of a piercing “déjà-vu” -- that of waiting upon the secret of the self. But such waiting, by becoming endless, can convert frustration into ecstasy: the pleasure of not yet being disappointed has all the time in the world to win out over the torture of denial, or of a void revealed, especially when the endless threshold suggests, thanks to the redness of the deep earth, the entrails of our beginning, and awakens in the depths of our memory the rocking before birth. That rocking is perhaps the loveliest “déjà-vu” that abstraction -- as practiced by Elisabeth Poiret  -- is capable of giving us.

            “La toile était levée, et j’attendais encore” [the curtain was raised, and still I waited] says the poet Baudelaire. Re-creator of the immemorial myth of the haunted threshold, Elisabeth Poiret nevertheless also grants the beholder the extra gift of a tilting of the senses -- an effectual crossing of the threshold -- by the fact of joining  her exploratory experiment with the invocatory one of poet Paul Villain, one of whose poems appears at the end of this article. And thus the voices multiply that call to us around the open entrance -- “Why a well? where have the horses gone? why are there no more angels?” -- , taking on the dimension of an Orphic complaint addressed to her who has gone beyond the door, and who lingers strangely about her return. In a certain sense, the Mind is imploring the Soul to come back again. But then the threshold is not a no-man’s-land, the anteroom does open upon the Elysian dwelling; “l'âme absente occupée aux enfers” [the absent soul busy in hell] (another poet: Valéry) forgets herself in the contemplation of the Love hidden somewhere down there. Should we recover her presence in awaking her from sleep -- and deprive her of the happiness she already tasted  in the dwelling? or should we leave whole the seals that keep her in ecstasy, but at the price of separation from oneself?  Yet another “déjà-vu”, in the form of a fatal question  which ( to put it in the language of myth) no mortal can deny, having experienced it in many forms in the meanders of his existence -- and kept it engraved in the labyrinths of his memory.

            The dialogue Elisabeth Poiret - Paul Villain has more than deserved our gratitude. Its capacity to awaken, in our contemplative spirit, the crowd of secret and forgotten inhabitants of our deepest self, who strain for at least a few moments in the light of day, has attained a remarkable level. Abstraction, that modern and tyrannical queen, has here lost her usual inhumanity.

The young girl I am dreaming of
is present in my sleep

                                                                        present like the moon and powder
in the wind of the steppe

The cold is not so cold
because her eyes do not know doubt

                                                                        A glorious day is born
in the ice forest

                                                                                   
Paul VIRES

                                                                        (in: La Revue du Tarn, no. 180, Winter 2000)    

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