LIBERTUS
Almost four years ago, I took up the brushes after a long absence. The only one I have had ever in this metier. I left the sketches as they were. Some paintings, still ready to be made, had remained in my mind, out of time. Even the ideas drifted gently in this ether of patience.
I tried sometimes to get back to it, put a canvas on the easel, prepared the paintings, brushes, but nothing helped. I did not start. I could not bring myself to draw the first line.
Seven years of reflexion, meditation, observation and contemplation have been right in my last chains. So, when I came back, I painted this canvas that had been waiting for me.
From that moment on, I began to paint again, without constraint, without effort, with ease and amusement that disconcerted me, a real walk.
"Freedom guides us" oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, 50 x 40 cm, 50 x 40 cm, (2015) embellished with a text from his owner
"I took some time to grasp (but did I grasp?) the complexity of a deliberately unfinished painting for the witness that we are - because symmetrically uncompleted - which can not be since it is deliberately unfinished it is first finished!
The paradox does not stop there, it is in the very freedom that faces us and which, while we are looking for its absent face, flees us suddenly to rush towards the horizon of the emphatic approach of weightlessness.
Does she face us? She is conquered; is she running away? She is playing!
The title of the painting is also not ingenuous: "Freedom guides us" is also a paradox - how, indeed, could a free being be guided (would it be by freedom itself!) without to be immediately insane? Can we then think of the problem of freedom and its antinomy (determinism and free will) with more than lightness, even derision? Can we finally get rid of this eternal question, simply by tending to a necessary joy, in the manner of Spinoza and as the painting suggests? But that's another question that comes up..."
I tried sometimes to get back to it, put a canvas on the easel, prepared the paintings, brushes, but nothing helped. I did not start. I could not bring myself to draw the first line.
Seven years of reflexion, meditation, observation and contemplation have been right in my last chains. So, when I came back, I painted this canvas that had been waiting for me.
From that moment on, I began to paint again, without constraint, without effort, with ease and amusement that disconcerted me, a real walk.
"Freedom guides us" oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, 50 x 40 cm, 50 x 40 cm, (2015) embellished with a text from his owner
"I took some time to grasp (but did I grasp?) the complexity of a deliberately unfinished painting for the witness that we are - because symmetrically uncompleted - which can not be since it is deliberately unfinished it is first finished!
The paradox does not stop there, it is in the very freedom that faces us and which, while we are looking for its absent face, flees us suddenly to rush towards the horizon of the emphatic approach of weightlessness.
Does she face us? She is conquered; is she running away? She is playing!
The title of the painting is also not ingenuous: "Freedom guides us" is also a paradox - how, indeed, could a free being be guided (would it be by freedom itself!) without to be immediately insane? Can we then think of the problem of freedom and its antinomy (determinism and free will) with more than lightness, even derision? Can we finally get rid of this eternal question, simply by tending to a necessary joy, in the manner of Spinoza and as the painting suggests? But that's another question that comes up..."
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