• Xavier Noiret-Thomé - Text | CV | Works

HARMONY AND CHAOS: PAINTING AS BALANCE OF POWER
By DANIELE ORHAN

In SUITE, La Lettre Volée, Brussels

“Give me matter and movement, and I will construct the world.” René Descartes

A suite can be defined as a sequence of events, like the episodes in a single story. Here, the story is about painting freed from its shackles and appears to want, through its format and the intensity of its colours, to freely embrace space. It pours itself out but physically lays claim to the painting. It is a risky gamble which presages current trends in painting. For upholding the sovereignty of a medium is tantamount to renewing that which characterises it exclusively, to surpassing its contradictions, to contemplating its history. In Xavier Noiret-Thomé’s approach, once the various founding elements of its attractiveness have been definitively assimilated, new developments constantly work against the dogmatism and framing of the form. This condemnation operates within the pictorial medium itself and confers on the surface all of the nature of a chessboard, a competitive space by any standards. However, the important aspect does not reside in the game but in the never-ending movement of the pieces, within the limits of the rules that it has established. Here, it is the surface, the frame of the painting. The eminently mobile light and colour transform these canvases into battlefields, where balances of power are demonstrated. Noiret-Thomé’s paintings are organic. The series appears as an interplay of vibrations. The vacant spaces of the canvases constitute areas of transparency, sensation transmitted by extreme clarity. The artist orchestrates a suite, accentuated by counterpoints which disturb a general composition. For rules of harmony emerge from these images.

Within the individual canvases and when taken as a whole, points of incandescence punctuate this suite. An orange fireball in Black Bill, the oval shape of a mask rising out of the darkness in L’Architecte, a point of light in Phoenix II. These lost traces of light like beacons draw our attention. They are pieces not of pure painting but enlarged details of an illusionist space, lost in the vibrant play of a space orchestrated by colours and lines. In this respect the presence of the same object in Polka and Tchet is paradigmatic: a ball that has gone astray from its game, whose volume is given by four rectangles of light. A line is stretched between the canvases, conferring an experimental nature on this suite, able to take a fresh look at the space of the painting through haunting visual memories. Hence this dialectic tension which unendingly goads and renews past antagonism. Supra-celestial, geological territories draw these enchanted figures, characterised by intestinal wars. Colombine divides its surface, fragmenting the layer of paint, shot at point blank into a burst of flame. In Black Bill, contrary elements fit together and violently oppose one another. The masses of colour strain towards one another. The line, escaping from these masses, meanders to the point of entanglement and forms a spiral. It has a labyrinthine complexity – closed in on itself but infinite. In the line, in the drawing, lies the crux of the tensions. Each figure in fact belongs to a collective memory. The childlike imagery accentuates this entrenchment in memory. In Karin à l’éléphant, the image takes over from the form: the bow tie, the animal’s attention fixed on the spectator, the young girl, reduced to a series of signs. In the lower part of the painting, vague figures borne out of a shadow theatre advance and cover the painting. In Oh-bongo!, an invisible spider spins its web, a cobweb whose only function is in the field of painting which it determines. The image gives way to the coloured surface. Noiret-Thomé’s suite perpetuates the memory of visual signs, pictographic elements, rather like an original script. But the density of colour alone directs the nonsensical grammar of these canvases. The snatches of reality blend unpredictably into the surfaces of colour. Their field is the imagination.

A battle begins between the geometric drawing — chessboard, grid, hatching and dots — and coloured masses — splashes, traces and drips. In Phœnix II, each projection of one of them is simply a conquest by the other. The radiating circle surges to the front of the battlefield from the incessant whirling of forms, catching and penetrating our gaze. The intervals of colour brush against one another, are superimposed and accentuate the organic tension in the painting.

But the series of blue, green, pink and grey achromes counterbalance this tension by testing the validity of the flat surface. The alea of the gesture may at any time tip the precarious balance of the composition, destabilising the internal structure of the canvas. A veil of colour is then draped over the forms to the point of enshrouding them and banishing the story of the painting. This coloured field is transformed into a separate entity. The black frame reflects the colour to its surface nature. The object is turned into painting. But the past structure constantly bubbles up to the surface. Micro-organisms abound under the coloured skin, concentrating an energy which well up from the interior. Through the interplay of transparency, the light catches these points, emerging from and rasping the surface. In Chromos, the silver absorbs the light whilst the line this time dominates the flatness of the canvas. Through its clarity, it reaches the forefront of the painting. This serpentine line follows the impetuous flight of an insect. The sprawling nympha of a butterfly, a chrysalis imprisoned in a cocoon of silk.

Noiret-Thomé’s painting teams with life and creates imaginary concretions resulting from geological, animal and plant worlds. It aims to perpetuate an original life but also to spiritualise matter, in that a “flood” of images is constantly sought. In so doing, gesture and language, products of the imagination, all concur to create depth. But here again, this search for depth is only equal to the transparency of the painting. For the disturbance caused by Xavier Noiret-Thomé’s painting arises from its diaphanousness. It tells its own story, the gestures which are made to emerge. However, this suite of paintings does not aim to show the appearance of images but the very principle of appearance. Currents of energy collide, are superimposed and converge occasionally into exploded, crystalline structures. The continents of patches and colours clash together, to the point of excluding any opacity in the painting. The light constantly evades the inertia of the canvas. If the parentheses close on this suite of painting events, they open up a space in which this immersion in memory and in the acknowledgement of painting can be pursued as a means of renewing images. Spatial, painting is necessarily about time, inasmuch as it unceasingly accuses the resurgence of the past, be it primordial, collective or individual. Noiret-Thomé’s (suite) shows us the possibility even of snatching fragments of what is visible, pieces of dreams in the accident of painting and the temporal sequences that its space enables us to penetrate.