Strange,To see that which was connected to you free of all ties,
floating through space.
R.M. Rilke.1
The need to create an impression of space
whilst respecting the flat surface of the painting.
D.Lewis.
How is the surface of a painting made up?
Is colour an emotive memory or a formal constituent? Where does it originate, this resonance, provoked by a surface born of itself, a resonance that comes to touch the onlooker?
These are questions that are posed in the work of David Lewis, for whom art remains an essential means to ask questions and seek answers.
Sensing places.[2]
Corner of a Field. Toscane, 2006.
Painting is above all a transfer, a transfer of an event, a poem, of an impression of a landscape onto a pictorial space that signifies, and also amplifies it.
It is not the elements themselves that are important, but their meaning. The question is how to use paint, and colour, to evoke sensation.
Here we are facing le réceptacle de sensations evoked by Paul Cézanne[3], whose painting remains David Lewis’ principal reference. In these two works, the key is the transfer of emotion to the pictorial figure. From a natural, immediate form of life we move to a pictorial form, a sign of structure and permanence. The structure is what reveals and establishes the fugitive vision. The painting thereby elucidates transmissions from the outside world, translating them as well as accentuating their intensity.
Painting is memory. The memory of the sensations brought about with brushstrokes, scraping and layering of oil paints.
The sensation is like a curl in a child’s hair. It exists in a memory, coiling continuously around itself. What I do now is what I did when I was six or seven. In Scotland, I had a sketch book; I can still feel those sketches, I can still feel those places.
The resistance of painting.
Study for old ways, 1991. Hérault I, 1996 .
Certain works retain traces of movement; others uncover the subjacent foundation with a synthetic cross-section of coloured planes. Everything is subtraction, a distancing from the anecdotal and the accidental in order to seize the unity of the subject, retaining its principal substance, irreducible. As a purification of the real, the painting attains poetic character, as described by Hölderlin[4].
The receptive world is a musical base which shows subtly through the layers of paint and the impregnation of the paper, rising to the surface in outlines or flashes of pigment. It is about the creation of a composition which occurs on the surface. David Lewis speaks of the physical area of the canvas as having two concepts, that of space and that of the flat plane of the surface.
By filtering shapes and colours, the surface becomes a vibrant space as defined by H. Matisse. There is also the issue of vibrant space. Giving life to a brushstroke, to a line, to bring a shape to life, this… is resolved outside, in the natural world, by an acute observation of the things that surround us.[5]
That which vibrates in the pictorial space is what preceded the painting, that is to say the mark left by the landscape and by the world on the artist.
The impossibility of painting.
Cascade, 1994. Borderline 2,2006.
The paintings of David Lewis are based on the principle of harmony, but a harmony founded on tension, on contradictions which, painting after painting, reinvent a balance, a bond of unity. A painting is a point of equilibrium between tensions, a point of harmony between opposites, but also an unveiling towards the ethereal.
Because if the artistic apparition is not composed in constant and neutralising opposition, the artistic means amount to the expression of ‘form’ and would be once again veiled by description, writes P. Mondrian.[6]
The point is not to describe a landscape or an emotion, nor to create a pictorial formalism. It is to create connections between experience and matter.
Listening to colour.
Along and Down. 2001. Sunlight on Hillside, 1991.
The solidity of the composition is equal to the fragility of colour which frays at the edges of certain paintings. The transparency of watercolours is equal to the opacity and saturation of certain canvases. The body of work explores contrasts such as those of format, of geometric shapes or of flat planes and relief, with the strokes of paint itself.
But the fundamental duality seems still to be that of drawing and colour, which are two different temporalities used to compose the pictorial space. Here, their interplay is very variable.
Drawing can correspond to the objective of purity, to a quest for a framework, but it can also define shape and aim to envelop features. Drawing plays less of a role lately. I make small sketches which help me to skip some of the steps towards a more precise refinement.
As for colour, it is vital in David Lewis’ work. Defining by plane, it is a field in extension, going beyond itself. Worked like a material in motion, it moves and vibrates in order to transport the onlooker towards the ethereal. Colour is absolutely central to my work. The physical becomes ethereal. Colour creates volume, and sound.
Listening to colour, measuring the impossibility of painting and finding, in each painting, its infinite resonance.
V. ONCINS 2007
[1]1 R.M.Rilke. Elégies duinésiennes, Imprimerie Nationale Editions, Paris, 1996, p. 59
[2] D. Lewis, Citations , dans le texte, sont en italique & gras
[3] P. Cézanne , Lettre à Gasquet, datée du 21 juillet 1896 .
[4] Hölderlin, Œuvres, III, Editions Gallimard, La Pléiade, Paris, 1967, p. 619.
[5] H. Matisse, Ecrits et Propos sur l’art. Hermann Ed. ; Paris , 1972, p. 251
[6] P. Mondrian, Le Néo-Plasticisme, Principe général de l’Equivalence Plastique, 1 920Résonances.