François Rouan braid memory and desire

Lyon. “Imprint: the word, like the thing, opens an immense territory, both literal and intangible … From trace to the stain, from figural form to the inform, from conversation to painting to the manipulation of quotation, from memory inscribed in pictorial layers to the infrared of the over-filled photographic film, the imprint, to be put to work, iswrites Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, exhibition commissioner alongside Sylvie Ramond, director of the Lyon Museum (Catalog). A necessary definition, since the title of the exhibition is precisely: “François Rouan, around the imprint”. A very large definition, however, and not without risk, as it becomes difficult to imagine which work could be excluded from it. However, it must be believed that this thematic approach is suitable for an artist present in the French aesthetic landscape for several decades – born in 1943 in Montpellier – but whose work remains difficult to identify. His journey, reluctant to any form of linearity, obeys a single principle: paint while relentlessly questioning traditional practice.

Associated, from the 1960s, with the support/surface movement – without being officially affiliated with it -, he is inspired by the latest works by Matisse, the gouaches cut, to develop his own method: braiding. Imprecise term, because this technique – assembling bands cut out of two previously painted canvases – moves away from the craft activity evoked by the word. Let François Rouan be careful to specify this process: “What I call braiding is a way of bringing into the plan of the picture of images is fragment, intrigiting, and in the interstices to pass something else. »»

Even if the beginnings of Rouan are not presented in Lyon, the exhibition allows you to discover, everywhere scattered in the rooms of the exhibition, complex works, born of collages, cutouts, imprints, reworked by drawing and painting. Faced with these compositions, the gaze gropes, the eye seeks benchmarks. The journey reveals an artist haunted by memories of war and the tragic, far removed from his most famous series, Doors, These shimmering canvases made during his stay at the Villa Medici (1971-1972).

Thus, the Stücke– “songs”, in German, a word used in the camps – were born from the shock caused by Rouan by the film Shoah (1985), by Claude Lanzmann. Log/Brasier/Ruin/Stücke (1989), chaotic tangle of lines where we guess bodies – corpses? – And a red spot – blood? – Relchanting on bluish tones, shows an image of the unrepresentable, without pretending to be the representation. Elsewhere, the Skulls – in reality vanities – or Transirefer to the consecrated figures of death in the history of art. Strangely, next to these dark and terrifying skulls, Transi are treated in bright and sparkling tones.

Eros and Thanatos

At Rouan, however, Eros is never far from Thanatos. Eroticism is above all, for him, a means of introducing the body into its materiality. It is undoubtedly through this theme that the imprint finds its most literal expression. However, caution is essential: if the Shells (See ill.) Take the forms of the female body, these are not real footprints – like the Anthropometry Yves Klein – but a painting confronted with the flesh and the desire it arouses.

On the other hand, the Turkish Roses take a photograph as a starting point – often overexposed or impressed several times – of the female sex. But here again, it is the work of displacement of the organs, of shock of the figure, which transforms the mechanical image into a properly artistic signature.

Can we speak of an imprint about the dialogue that Rouan has with the history of art? No doubt, if we consider that quotation or borrowing from the past – in other words memory – leave their trace in the creative process. It is in Siena that the artist studies the frescoes of Lorenzetti, Allegory and effects of good and bad government. According to Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, the work of the Italian painter, revisited by Rouan, finds echoes in the series Seasons and Cassoneand even, twenty years later, in Maps from the early 2000s. Another striking example: theSelf -portrait de Miró (1919), discovered by the painter during a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1993. Fascinated, he used a layer and a reproduction of the work to find the different stylistic influences – Romanesque art, cubism, futurism. To the dozens of details of the faces he draws are added other elements arranged of free associations – female sex, minotaur … “From the self -portrait, written Rouan, I Brought back, behind this multitude of stylistic loans, a beast that was there, lurking, underlying, as hidden behind the big frightened eyes. »»

With Rouan, the imprint is never simple.