(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
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.
