Exhibition catalog, under the direction of Jean-Louis ANDRAL, Patrick MAURIES.
Pierre Skira, the ways of being of pastel.
The Contemporary Workshop
Regular price
€25,00
| N° d'inventaire | 25929 |
| Format | 21 x 25 |
| Détails | 128 p., color illustrations, paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Strasbourg, 2022 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782850351013 |
Delacroix said: "It takes a heart of steel to finish a painting." It's not just about conveying the vision of what you have in your head, because in abstraction there is no subject, you rely on strange notions, colors, shapes, spaces, but at a certain point the thing leaves you, because the thing is stronger than us. Picasso said it perfectly: "painting is stronger than me: it makes me do what it wants."
Pastel is doubt, and I want to keep this doubt, because doubt is human. Painting doesn't serve much purpose, except perhaps to ask questions. And the big question for me today is that of form. Bernard Noël, shortly before he died, wrote me a very nice letter in November 2020, a letter in which he wrote a painter's phrase about my pastels: "It is the form that questions, as if traversed by a message that quivers within it." What interests me is the tension between form and space. Painting is a great mystery, we try to revive a form that we have seen, for example, in Georges de la Tour or Mondrian. When they painted, they were in the form, they delimited it by a play of tensions, and I remember it today in my abstract paintings where I increase or decrease the intensity and density of the color according to the distance or not that is created between a shade and its neighbor, now leaving more and more white, breathing space between each form, to be less wise. It is a language that must be listened to, letting the brush or the stick go, and which tells you if the right balance is found; and the painting is finished when it surprises me: because nothing must ever be acquired.
Pastel is doubt, and I want to keep this doubt, because doubt is human. Painting doesn't serve much purpose, except perhaps to ask questions. And the big question for me today is that of form. Bernard Noël, shortly before he died, wrote me a very nice letter in November 2020, a letter in which he wrote a painter's phrase about my pastels: "It is the form that questions, as if traversed by a message that quivers within it." What interests me is the tension between form and space. Painting is a great mystery, we try to revive a form that we have seen, for example, in Georges de la Tour or Mondrian. When they painted, they were in the form, they delimited it by a play of tensions, and I remember it today in my abstract paintings where I increase or decrease the intensity and density of the color according to the distance or not that is created between a shade and its neighbor, now leaving more and more white, breathing space between each form, to be less wise. It is a language that must be listened to, letting the brush or the stick go, and which tells you if the right balance is found; and the painting is finished when it surprises me: because nothing must ever be acquired.
Pastel is doubt, and I want to keep this doubt, because doubt is human. Painting doesn't serve much purpose, except perhaps to ask questions. And the big question for me today is that of form. Bernard Noël, shortly before he died, wrote me a very nice letter in November 2020, a letter in which he wrote a painter's phrase about my pastels: "It is the form that questions, as if traversed by a message that quivers within it." What interests me is the tension between form and space. Painting is a great mystery, we try to revive a form that we have seen, for example, in Georges de la Tour or Mondrian. When they painted, they were in the form, they delimited it by a play of tensions, and I remember it today in my abstract paintings where I increase or decrease the intensity and density of the color according to the distance or not that is created between a shade and its neighbor, now leaving more and more white, breathing space between each form, to be less wise. It is a language that must be listened to, letting the brush or the stick go, and which tells you if the right balance is found; and the painting is finished when it surprises me: because nothing must ever be acquired.