« Even if there can be tracks, splashes of paint and relief, the essential lies in the scraping, the trailing, the meticulous excavation like on an archaeological dig, the hunt for ghosts hidden between two layers or levels, »
Michel Butor, writer.
« Pierre Marie Brisson is a facile draughtsman, a superb and sensitive colorist, a master of design and composition, and a creator of richly tactile surfaces. » Robert Flynn Johnson, curator.
« These images remind us of something, a precious and gentle memory… »
Jean Rouaud, writer.
[Press Review]
in LE CHEMIN DES GESTES, Editions d'Art Somogy, 2004
Pierre Marie Brisson’s works are about pleasure, as the title of one of his series suggests––pleasure in nature, pleasure in life, and, more broadly, taking pleasure in appearances. Robert Flynn Johnson begins his essay on Brisson with a quotation from Goethe: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”1 Brisson clearly takes pleasure in looking––in the sheer pleasure of seeing what is to be seen, and artistically transforming it so that it becomes even more pleasurable: aesthetically pleasurable. For Brisson is an aestheticist in the classical sense, whatever his theme: he is in pursuit of disinterested pleasure, as Kant called it; that is, pleasure liberated from “any considerations of advantage or utility,” as the British aesthetician Harold Osborne says. Moreover, he adds, such pleasure involves “a feeling of something just out of grasp, a sense of something still to be apprehended, a revelation and a light just beyond reach.”2 Paradoxically, Brisson seems to put this something just out of grasp within sensuous grasp through his painterly surfaces. Inspired in part by the Lascaux caves, they have a look of prehistoric decay, a timeless patina that gives them an archaeological look. This seems particularly evident in Grand Air and Ittaque, and, more subtly, in the flower paintings of the Plaisir series. These surfaces have the sad freshness of the Pompeii frescos––the look of another world, yet one which we recognize, emotionally, as our own. It is through this complicated surface, at once agitated and frail, alive yet peculiarly tragic––through this texture, with its intricate and insidious sensuousness, at once raw and refined, a texture like an abandoned ruin of strong feeling, a texture which turns flat space into flowing time––that Brisson enters the domain of the aesthetic. “The aesthetic object,” the French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne writes, “is perceived as real without referring to the real, to a cause for its appearing; that is, to painting as canvas, music as the sound of instruments, the body of a dancer as an organism. The aesthetic object is nothing more than the sensuous in all its glory, whose form, ordering it, manifests plenitude and necessity, and which carries within itself and immediately reveals the meaning that animates it.”3 It is through their poignant texture, the drama of the contrasts that inform it, that Brisson’s slices of wall become pure plenitude and necessity––sensuous presence in all its innocent glory. Brisson’s figures and faces live through their movements and expressions, but it is the texture that envelops them––forms the aura-like environment in which they exist––that gives them aesthetic presence, suggesting their inner life, the emotion that moves them.
I think there is another idea of the aesthetic that brings us closer to the core of Brisson’s paintings. The art historian and philosopher, Ananda Coomaraswamy, has written: “It will not, then, surprise us to find that it is not only in connection with natural objects (such as a dewdrop), or events (such as death), but also in connection with works of art; and in fact whenever or wherever perception (aisthesis) leads to a serious experience, that we are really shaken.”4 For Brisson the tension between darkness and light, evident in many of his figures, is as serious and thrilling an experience as the figures themselves. The expressive faces in the Les Blanches series, the moving bodies in the Salins and Juillet series, the dancing figures in the Entre deux rondes and Variation series, as well as the colorful flowers in the Plaisir series, are naturally aesthetic. Brisson purifies the aesthetic tension that exists within nature, constructing a pure aesthetic space out of it––a space of flat planes, dramatic contrasts, luminous colors, seductive rhythms. Indeed, the decorative and abstract ambition of Brisson’s paintings has a certain affinity with that of Paul Gauguin. There is a similar “synthetist” approach and symbolist undertone––a post-Impressionist sensibility.
Gauguin, too, was interested in “going native”––in the exoticism of the so-called primitive. Most of Brisson’s figures are African, just as those of Gauguin are Polynesian. But Brisson is not reviving the myth of the noble savage––of the untouched purity and emotional directness of pre-industrial people––however much he seems to be. (Although, one has to say, his black figures look more vital and spontaneous than his white figures, who seem more disturbed and pensive. They are certainly more inhibited––victims of so-called civilization.) Brisson is not offering yet another aesthetically modified Primitivism however much, as Jean Rouaud suggests,5 he seems to be reviving the myth of the golden age––of an archaic paradise where happiness comes naturally because knowledge and thinking are not necessary. Instead, what I think Brisson is doing, in a spirit of postmodern reconciliation, is integrating what might be called French decorative aestheticism––evident from Monet to Matisse and climaxing in what Clement Greenberg called the hedonistic “luxury painting” of the Paris School––into modernist Primitivism. Paradoxically, Gauguin is one of the father figures of both: his work is an aestheticist fantasy, as well as a Primitivist attack on the European classicist tradition, with its sense of calm harmony and balanced completeness. Brisson’s works have a certain classical calm and completeness, even as they are informed by a modernist aesthetic.
Brisson has roots in both the French decorative tradition, with what might be called its grand sensuous manner, and in modernist Primitivism, with its aggressive emotionality and forthright expressiveness. Let me add something else: Brisson’s sense of “prehistoric texture,” with its raw sensuousness, is also informed by what might be called American decorative painting (Greenberg understood it that way); painting that mediated the sublime through decorative, sensuous expanses of subtly gradated and interrelated colors, from both the painterly as well as post-painterly schools. Brisson achieves a balance of forces between French and American Abstract Decorative painting, and the broader modernist current of Primitivism, which is one of their roots. Working through a traditional modernist beauty, Brisson is in search of new beauty, more delicate and less ruthless, but nonetheless emotionally engaging.
If one studies the emotionality of Brisson’s paintings, as distinct from their handling––however much the latter necessarily informs and conveys the former––one realizes that there is a certain unresolved sense of conflict (perhaps also signaled by the abrupt oscillation between black and white in many of the works). I think this is most subtly evident in the images that have to do with dance: images reminiscent of Degas’ pictures of female dancers, as well as, more obliquely, Matisse’s dance paintings. Brisson’s dancers are not Degas’ “rats” nor Matisse’s naked “rustics,” not vulgar urban dancers struggling to be theatrically suave, nor percussive and perverse Stravinsky-like orgiasts; but rather figures who are not entirely at home in their white dresses, suggesting their purity and innocence, nor in their naked flesh, for they have been “corrupted,” as it were, by Western ideas of dance art. They seem uneasy––subliminally anxious and unpoised. They struggle to find the right position, hoping to conform to Western expectations. They prepare for the next performance with no certainty that it will measure up to sophisticated Western dance standards. Will they be applauded or booed off the stage? Will they be graceful or awkward––as awkward as they look?
I am suggesting that Brisson’s pictures are ironically Rousseau-like. Rousseau is famous for having said that we are born free, but find ourselves in social chains. He deplored civilization as corrupting natural morality; as emotionally more barbaric than so-called barbaric society. Brisson’s dancers are caught between nature and society. Their naturally black bodies do not seem to belong in their white dresses. The contrast seems absurd, paradoxical––the incongruity is blatant. The point is made with startling clarity in Les Ballerines and Impromptu. Do the clouds that surround the chorus line of dancers––presumably it is a backdrop, a theatrical prop––indicate that they are in a dream world of their own? Where is the audience? Degas has works that picture the audience, and his pictures of dancers rehearsing in their studios has an implicit audience, symbolized by the dance master and sometimes an onlooker (usually male, making for a certain sexual frisson and innuendo). Indeed, there is a kind of dream aura to Brisson’s dance paintings––the sense of inhabiting a fantasy––in contrast to Degas’ often stark realism.
Variations I and II make the point explicitly: the male figure is a kind of free spirit dancing in the sky and above the forest. He represents a dream of freedom, vitality, spontaneity––the body liberated from the confines and necessities of society. And yet he is not naked in nature, but wears a white outfit––body-hugging white pants, or a tight-fitting leotard. They are symbols of civilization,––inhibiting constraints––they might as well be straightjackets for all the lyric freedom of movement, compromising the dancer’s leaps above the earth. (The loin-clothed figures in Le Musicien and Salinas I are as close to wild, naked freedom, total self-abandonment, and lack of physical inhibition, as Brisson comes, but the figure is also another performer on a magical stage.) His freedom is an illusion, or it has been harnessed to the demands of art. He is caught betwixt and between, at once wild and domesticated by art, and neither satisfactorily. Brisson is not picturing the golden age, but the golden age and the Iron Age––the ironic inter-penetration of paradise and the world after the fall. Paradise survives only in the illusion of art, more particularly, the attempt to make inspired art. Civilization is always looking for fresh bodies to reinvigorate it, but as soon as it finds them it uses them for its own purposes (however ostensibly lofty), draining their spirit. Slaves to high art, Brisson’s dancers, female and male, are no longer the naturally free spirits they at first seem to be.
Brisson’s portraits seem to escape the Rousseau dilemma of the relationship between the artificial and the natural, the social and the spontaneous, the forced and the unaffected, that his dance pictures seem to pose, but the people in them seem emotionally shopworn and depleted. They also seem less theatrical. Yet the expressions on the flat-faced figures in Les Blanches I and II seem forced and mechanical, as though they were playing at having feelings, which suggests a certain emotional enervation. And the melancholy Carla and Eduardo, as well as the figure in Les Blanches III, while deeply introspective, seem to be burdened by feelings they can neither fathom nor exorcise, let alone adequately express. These works do not have the theatrical implication of the dance pictures––the sense that the rhetoric of performance determines the “scene”––suggesting that Brisson has stripped his figures emotionally naked, leaving them defenseless and vulnerable. Indeed, they seem to be at a loss. They seem to be decomposing, as the surface suggests, turning into ghosts of themselves, fading memories of unlived life. They are ruins of themselves, as the “ruined” surface suggests. The paint surface is streaked, revealing the ground, as though a veil had been torn and nothing found underneath. Here the aura of decay informs the representation.
If the flowers in the Plaisir series are portraits of beautiful natural objects, and the flowers rise above the barren sand-colored ground and float ecstatically among the clouds of the sky––poised in all their perfection against the surrounding indifference,––then the portraits of human objects suggest a certain deflation of high feelings, however evident these seem in some of the dancers–– who are artists or would-be artists. One might say the former show, ironically, that nature alone can fulfill what Stendhal called art’s promise of happiness, while man-made art––as distinct from the flowers, which are nature’s art at its most obvious––ambiguously fulfills it. The aesthetician, Theodor Adorno, has written: “Art is like a plenipotentiary of a type of praxis that is better than the prevailing praxis of society, dominated as it is by brutal self-interest. This is what art criticizes. It gives the lie to the notion that production for production’s sake is necessary, by opting for a mode of praxis beyond labor. Art’s promesse du bonheur, then, has an even more emphatically critical meaning: it not only expresses the idea that current praxis denies happiness, but also carries the connotation that happiness is beyond praxis.”6 Brisson’s paintings make this ironically clear. Indeed, they show the irony built into the utopian promise of happiness. They are meditations on the paradox of art, that offers aesthetic happiness, which is not exactly the same as human happiness.
Notes
1. Robert Flynn Johnson, “Surface and Sensitivity,” Pierre Marie Brisson: Les Jeux séculaires (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2003), p. 8.
2. Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory (London: Longmans, Green, 1968), p. 100.
3. Mikel Dufrenne, In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in
Aesthetics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987), p. 5.
4. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Samvega: Aesthetic Shock,” Selected Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), vol. 1, p. 182.
5. Jean Rouaud, “The Golden Age,” Pierre Marie Brisson: Les Jeux
séculaires (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2003), p. 6.
6. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984), p. 17