Geneviève ASE’s Rhapsody in blue and gray

Rodez (Aveyron). Unlike other museums devoted to an artist, where programming focuses on it, exhibitions in Rodez often take freedom from Pierre Soulages. The Gutaï group, Pierrette Bloch, Lucio Fontana or Calder are some of the monographs that we owe to Benoît Decron, director of the premises. The foreword to the catalog generally is working to justify the choice of the exhibited artist. For Geneviève Asse (1923-2021), Alfred Pacing, President of the Soulages Museum, writes: “The two painters knew each other, respected themselves. Both had started to exhibit the day after the war by affirming their independence from the artistic movements that dominated the time. Impregnated with their respective environments (the sea and the sky of Brittany for one, the platforms of the Causses and Rouergue for the other), they had kept the memory of these founding spaces in their approach to painting. »»

Give a pictorial shape to silence

But this exhibition above all makes it possible to rediscover a work too often reduced to abstractions painted in blue. A detailed shade of this color bears its name: the “Blue Asse”. The presentations of his work often tend to make a poetic production. It is true that the artist, who grew up in Morbihan in front of the sea, contributes himself to this perception, frequently evoking the importance of blue, which “Take everything that goes”, According to the title of the exhibition.

The route, not strictly chronological, alternates the figurative beginnings of Geneviève Asse with her abstract works. At first, the artist features everyday objects – bottles, fades, boxes – sometimes simply placed on the corner of an isolated table, sometimes located as part of the workshop. The whole is painted in shades of gray and beige, inevitably evoking Jean Siméon Chardin, but even more Giorgio Morandi. As with the latter, objects, of absolute counting, excluding any superfluous detail, are not simple accessories but real actors. As with the Italian painter, they seem to give a pictorial form to what cannot be: silence. If, in his first works, the contours are clearly asserted, these gradually fade until objects are based in space. Thus, in Small cup (1957), the silhouette of the cup is almost confused with its shadow.

Then, two canvases exposed side by side testify to the evolution of the artist. With the first, Object in spacea floating rectangle still retains the trace of an object. With the second, Composition: colors in spacea truncated chromatic circle unfolds like a fan. We think of Kandinsky, who claimed to memorize the colors of the things he had seen during his childhood, but not the objects themselves.

Brightness for subject

Follow canvases in vertical format, where the border between interior and exterior is uncertain. White door (1968) and Tribute to Saenredam (1969) have white surfaces traveled with trembling lines – Doors or window amounts? – which suggest an opening in light. Light, or rather brightness, then becomes the real subject of several magnificent paintings, where a tiny horizontal white Sterie radiates in the heart of a gray surface (Light opening1973).

Without explicitly resorting to the serial technique, Geneviève ESA achieves variations, systematically taking up her compositions as if to deepen her perception. By repeating the same experiences with slight alterations, tirelessly representing the same reason, it seeks to better grasp the world and reinvent it. This effort reveals the slow composition work, the fragility of each “solution” and its successive adjustments. In his universe, no subject is not just one image, no painting is never closed on himself: he takes on his full meaning in his relationship with others.

Little by little, large blue fields appear. Particularly striking are the four immense Stelae (1995) with a white, vertical incision this time, like a lightning. Abstract landscape? nocturnal? Geneviève Asse avoids this assimilation: if nature probably remains its starting point, it is by no means the culmination.

Faced with this singular work, a question is essential that only the distance makes it possible to approach, that of the place of this artistic production in its historical context and its possible influence. One certainty remains: the availability of Geneviève Asse with beauty.