Slow Impact. Olivier Filippi

(First published in French in Olivier Filippi, catalogue of the exhibition of the prize-winners of "November in Vitry")

Artist's website: http://o.filippi.free.fr
Version française: http://heterotopiques.blogspot.fr/2008/06/lent-impact.html

One of the canonical definitions of painting appeals to material components: a canvas, stretched on a usually rectangular frame, that defines the space of the pictorial practice. Connected to the modernistic tradition, this definition conceives painting as an activity that is autonomous (with respect to the world and to its surrounding space), introspective (in its means and critical objectives) and detached (from products given up to cultural industries).

Looking hastily at Olivier Filippi’s paintings, one might — wrongly — connect them to this conception. His works, the abstraction of which is as uncluttered in terms of means (strong elements in limited numbers) as it is efficient in terms of effects (one shot images), inevitably evoke antecedents like Color Field paintings, hard-edge and minimalist American abstraction. Yet, even if these antecedents are both present and important among the “sources” of Olivier Filippi’s works, one should not overstate their role. To do so would be to overlook — conceptually as well as formally speaking — the complexity and the range of influences of these works, stretching across photography, 3D digital imaging, aggressive graphics of cartoons and advertising logos. Nevertheless, if Olivier Filippi’s works bring to mind associations with the products and images of the consumer society, they never simply “use” its images or ready-made signs. On the contrary, they stem from a slow process of elaboration. He borrows from the painters of late modernism the deductive logic that governs their works, and hijacks it in the same movement: the painting, though constructed “from its sides”, does not underline and does not repeat its limits. The painter is apparently trying to fix the ever-fluctuating trajectories of hypothetical and vividly colored objects — crossing the pictorial field without stopping anywhere, jumping from side to side in an unpredictable way, suddenly turning in this or that direction, drawing parabolic curves which leave a color trace as in the retinal persistence phenomenon. These movements, seen in their instantaneousness, give a temporal dimension to the painting. The sensation of speed that predominates there is actually produced slowly, by stretching the moment of the “gesture”, of the inscribing on the surface. These trajectories, these temporary figures look simple but they are not: their lines are never drawn “in one stroke”; they are the result of patient adjustments of their thickness and their curve, of constant “fine tuning” of the tensions of their bends, of the almost geological intrication of the multiple and superimposed layers. The surface is not seen as a given, nor as a limit. It is progressively built by the line which separates (through its cutting edge) or combines (through the play of the gradation) a colored and curved “figure” and a monochrome “background” which is usually metallic white, but sometimes in a color sharply in contrast with the color of the figure. As a consequence, figure and background are frequently insoluble, and sometimes open to revertibility. For the painter, the goal is not so much to inscribe a pre-drawn figure on the surface of a canvass stretched on a frame, than it is to produce and “stretch” the surface of the painting through a voluntarily limited number of operations: anchor the curves on the sides of the painting or wriggle out of them, cause the trajectory to rebound or suggest its continuation “off camera”, extend or compress its curve, create a depth of field or avoid it by associating “blurred” and “sharp” limits. These paintings are the result of a sedimentation of a past that has become invisible and has been the object of a conversion which concentrates on a fixed, efficient and immediate image — the slow energy being spread along their elaboration.

The drawings, on the other hand, proceed from a very different mode of conception and creation — which implies a materiality and a resulting effect that are very specific as well. Smaller, fragile-looking (as opposed to the paintings, defined by a very high “finish” quality), these drawings are conceived and made as series — as a sequence of variations inside a format. Variations in which moderation plays an important role. The range of tools chosen here (crayon, graphite, pen, felt pen, marker pen) serves a spontaneous and immediate writing process (curves, punctuations, graffiti) which cannot be corrected, which gladly integrates accidents (stains, dots, fragments of previous figures) and which also accepts the ever-possible irruption of incomplete figurative hints, often humorous or childlike (stylized flowers, heads or clouds). Next to the paintings, these drawings have a different relationship with time. As repeated annotations, as temporary situations, they spread all over the increased space of the ensemble they represent the strata which are condensed in the multi-layered surface of the paintings.

Following two distinctive methods, Olivier Filippi’s pictorial and graphic works put to the test the speed of images, the obvious commercial aspect of graphic design born from Pop, the “pure surfaces” aspect of the cultural mass-production. The drawings dismantle the process aimed, in the paintings, at reaching, through a slow and intuitive process, a strength and impact similar to the strength and impact of the technological and advertising images. As such, within the space and the moment of improvisation and “disorder” they give to themselves, and through their fragility itself, they combine the great mastery shown in recent paintings to the expression of a deep and thoughtful wish for impending renewals and unexpected destinies.