INTERVIEW in MOZAIKRIM
EMILIE BITAULD, VISUAL ARTIST: "WE ARE TOO ENTERTAINED; MY AFRICAN YEARS HELPED ME TO HAVE A DEEP AWARENESS OF THIS AND TO RETURN TO THE HUMAN."
"There are imaginaries that go the opposite way of clearing the horizon. These imaginaries, almost in a fetal position, seek the original and natural, almost 'pure' state of the human spirit. They look for the satori, this original intuition, of "the First awakening". The spirit of Emilie Bitauld is of these imaginaries. Her first series focused on "telluric and cosmic forces". Her work, , mainly abstract at the time, covered subjects ranging from the evocation of meteorological phenomena to the representation of plant elements through the movements of stars (Big Bang). A variegated imagination, tortuous without being tortured, sometimes realistic, sometimes impressionistic, often abstract and uncluttered, stripped of all that would be useless in this quest for the original spirit.
"Be intimate with your life, for your life itself is the Way" said Buddhist master Taizan Maezumi. This spiritual intimacy is reflected in Emilie Bitauld's work and words. Interview.
How long have you been painting?
I have been painting for as long as I can remember. I started doing reproductions of Cézanne and Gauguin in elementary school. I was also filling in dozens of notebooks in the playground. This and reading occupied most of my free time until high school, when I left my family to pursue a course of study specializing in art. However, my professional life did not always allow me to have the brain time available and the studio at the same time. It's only since 2012 that I've made art a full-time profession.
You have worked in cultural project engineering and international development. How have you reconciled these two parallel activities?
Before 2012, I was not able to develop my artistic practice as I would have liked.
As an artist's agent and director of cultural venues, projects and events, to which I added various functions in galleries, each of the positions I held nevertheless corresponded to a potential training for the artist's profession and completed my initial training.
Indeed, thinking with Bernard de Chartre (master of the XIIth century) that we are dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, it seemed important to me to reinforce my general knowledge and practical skills, particularly writing skills, adapted to our times. So it was more in this context that the link between the several professions I have exercised and art has manifested itself.
Between the relatively abstract works (I'm thinking of the painting Untitled 3, Invisible series) and your look at moments of life in particular geographical places (Lampposts series), where does this "reality on the frontiers of the invisible and the spiritual" that you evoke lie?
It depends on each series. It is only in the series INVISIBLE that I evoke this "real at the frontiers of the invisible and the spiritual", a series for which I wanted to start with the idea of "satori": the spiritual awakening of Zen Buddhism.
You quote an aspect of Jean-François Billeter's "paradigm": "The great painters teach us how the worlds we see are formed within us. They introduce us to the laboratory where our relationship to the visible is elaborated." Do you have this relationship with the visible even outside the work of painting on canvas or producing installations?
I would tend to hope (and perhaps this is even a form of resistance) that while accepting the invisible, we know how to look and see better.
So the answer to your question is undoubtedly "yes", in terms of light, for example. There is no greater subject than light. Whether it is evil and draws us into the night of our invisibles, or beneficial and illuminates us, as in the Lampposts series that has occupied most of my time over the last few years. It's all about capturing a kind of availability of the lamp-post subject, manifesting a presence of the invisible, of the soul, of the space of the soul, to build a work. Basically, I am a fallen symbolist.
To talk more specifically about the Invisible series, I would say that it is inseparable from a form of defiance towards "spectacularization". We are overly entertained. My years in Africa helped me to be deeply aware of this, to return to the human. Not to give in to distraction.
It is a manifesto series, which sometimes uses the lettering of protest signs, or hitchhiking, two activities that project the individual towards the Other, whether they lift him out of individualism like the first, or whether they force the encounter like the second activity, with people that one would not have met if one had remained in one's comfort zone. Basically, this series evokes a simple resistance to the values of the consumer society, the society of the spectacle and of the simulacrum, but also to that of the growing populism and the media manipulation that too often goes hand in hand with that of mass tourism, sometimes turning us into tourists of our own existence.
A mainstream that too easily leads us to believe that we don't need to think for ourselves. In my work in general, I counter this with other values, other behaviors. In the Lampposts series, I would talk about really listening, really looking... The little things of everyday life are enough, the contemplation, the exaltation of nature, despite the theme, here apparent, of urban design elements. The Big-Bang series, for example, projects the human further into the cosmos, notably through silence. It's also a form of reaction and of resistance.
"I WOULD HOPE THAT WHILE WE ACCEPT THE UNSEEN, WE KNOW HOW TO LOOK AND SEE BETTER."
"WHAT I MEAN, BASICALLY, IS THAT THIS LAMPPOST IS A BIT OF OUR INNER HERMIT."
How much interpretation do you leave to the mind when contemplating your paintings?
The "regardeur," to quote Duchamp, has taken on a central role in contemporary art. In fact, I find the interview exercise rather difficult, in that it encourages chatter. So I do it as a game, bearing in mind that I hope not to say too much, to leave room to the viewer's imagination. On a day-to-day basis, for example, I don't talk about my work until people who ask me what I do have at least had a look at some photos on my website, even if it's not as good as the reality of the pieces. To stay grounded in reality, I'm currently staying at a production residency at The Edge Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and I am spending a lot of time on the Lampposts series, so I'm going to continue working on it. I hope to create suspense in the silent presence of the lamppost. I'm contrasting it with an action scene, to use cinematographic terms (and to illustrate, by comparison with Hollywood cinema, our revealing need for entertainment). In this singular research, I hope to instill a sense of mystery in the subject matter, inviting the viewer to be all the more active, simply leading the beholder to look. And to extend the metaphor, one is entitled to ask: what scenario? What does it tell? The lamppost is an object close to each and every one of us... unless we never leave the desert, which must not happen very often anymore! And by the way, my very first Lampposts was inspired by photos of lampposts I had taken in the Egyptian desert.
Basically, what I am trying to say is that this lamppost is a bit like our inner hermit. Not without derision, and to return to the question of the subject, I ultimately tend to give power back to the anecdote, taboo, even heresy, on the art market for decades ; I deliberately use the word "market" rather than the expression "contemporary art scene". Choosing everyday objects is a way of taking into consideration the spectator, of appealing to him or her, by tending to play on a certain fascination that a painting can exert, by playing on this capacity of absorption that a piece can arouse. In a work of art, we tend to get sucked in, as in life, as in cinema, and perhaps even better than in cinema, where there are so many images per minute that we have no time for reflection. I like the idea of reflecting like a mirror and interpreting with our experience what an image can convey to us. This is also my first figurative series, and I find it all too easy to oppose figuration-narration and abstraction-universality. But sometimes there's something going on in a painting, and you can't really tell what it is. Despite the apparent theme of an element of urban design, often decaying and in this way a reflection of the way we live together, it is the exaltation, without the need for narration, that I am looking for.
To sum up and to conclude on the subject of the invisible and interpretation, I would like to quote Ablaye Kansaye, a Malian tourist guide with whom I have kept in touch since my first year in Africa, and who said something to me about Bambara masks that I've never forgotten: "Tiwara is not the mask of the antelope, nor of the antelopes; it is the mask of the spirit of the antelope."
"TO GIVE AN IDEA OF MY PROCESS: THERE IS THE INITIAL INTUITION, THEN MONTHS OF RESEARCH, REFLECTION, SKETCHING, CRYSTALLIZATION OF A MOMENT, A PRESENT MOMENT AND THE UNDERLYING QUEST FOR A SUSPENDED THOUGHT."
Hainan's Monsieur Zero: intuitively I see it as work within a work, a painting within a painting. How did you start it?
My work is nourished by visits to museums around the world. The impact of certain paintings and other pieces can be found in some of my paintings or installations. This is also true of other arts, such as music, which often gives titles to this series, or of literature in this case. In fact, as with all the other Lampposts, at the beginning I took a photo of a street lamp. This time, what appealed to me was the nod to American literature, and particularly this type of thriller, the stories of anti-heroes. It's a novel in the vein of John Fante and "My Stupid Dog". There was also this almost perfect coincidence between two images that were surprisingly intertwined; a subtle imperfection that I wanted to keep, in the offset of an island and the shoreline of the book cover. While originally, I was taking this photo to tell someone that he was Mr. Zero because he was not on this beach with me. My autobiography necessarily informs my work. But that's another story. I like this immediate suspension of the narrative, of the subject.
To give an idea of my process: There is the first intuition (satori- ed.), then months of research, reflection, sketches, crystallization of a moment, of a present moment and the underlying quest for a suspended thought. Compared to what I I was doing before, I am operating a kind of return to the subject, but I am not a realist painter either. I want to communicate on a sensation, the sensation of night for example, and on a reflection, without just wanting to say something, as for example: "It is the night. "
It can also be a certain feeling of isolation, or that of necessary inaction, the search for suspense. In this series, I try to paint the very conditions of thought. One of my loyal collectors likes to say that one of the Lampposts gives him a bit of his mental weather. When he gets up in the morning, he sees something completely different depending on his mood. The picture can be totally gloomy or cheerful depending on what is on his mind.
In fact, to put the Lampposts back in context, there are the result of 20 years of photographs of street lamps wich I spend a lot of time looking at and selecting a variety of reasons: from the most extreme banality (which removes from the picture the pretension of any relevant subject) to the metaphysical. The bizarre attracts me, as do contrasts and the absurd. The subject, whether it is obvious or not, is often dystopian. Between dog and wolf, some paintings say, in the manner of Magritte, who is a major reference of this series: This is not a sunset. This is also what I am aiming for with the "old postcard" effect. I put this expression in quotation marks, because it's fair to wonder whether the genre and exercise of the postcard aren't falling into disuse, something I'm actively resisting. I like this contrast between a semblance of utopia, of collective fantasy, and the disappointment of the ideas that first determined the choice of subject. There is also a great irony, a form of provocation, in giving such dignity to objects that have, a priori, no prestige whatsoever.
By MAMOUDOU KANE