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Candour


My practice of colour is no doubt characterized by candour. The neologism "chromogony"
appeared so to speak out of nowhere, when I undertook to set my creed to paper, by which I
hoped to rediscover the primitive gaze of our forebears when they looked upon the cosmos.
But the goal is above all to discover, here and now, a gaze devoid of any intention, a gaze
emancipated from language in order to attach itself directly to colour as a pure sensory
given.
Art is all too often garrulous, and all too often, too, it presents itself in the shape of obvious
signals. A totalitarian semiotics then takes charge and can hardly be distinguished from the
messages of advertising, whose very violence and discourse it appropriates. This violence
no longer has anything in common with the potency that animates the creative gaze.
We are submerged in language, as everyone knows, but I bear testimony to the fact that a
certain art can open a fissure in the order of language and thus reach what is most primitive
in us, for art is not a form of "progress", it is the most fervent desire and the most essential
nostalgia of our civilisations, independently of the materials and technologies to which it
resorts.
David Lipszyc
11 December 2010