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RADU TUIAN |
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APRES ET AVANT |
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Du 23 au 28 Avril 2024, Galerie du Havre, 12 rue du
HAVRE, 17590, Ars-en-Ré |
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Vernissage Jeudi 25 avril à 18h Ouvert
tous les jours entre 11h -13h et 16h -19h
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Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Monday, April 8, 2024
Figure-Scape - 2015, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm
Fresh Form Fruit, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 4- cm
Territorial Claim, 2022, acrylic on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm
Fading Icon, 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm
A Double Face (Two Faced) - 2022, oil on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm
Darling Plastics - 2022, acrylic on wood panel, 55 x 46 cm
Mobilisation Generale (Water Shed) - 2022, acrylique sur toile, 55 x 46 cm
Sunday, April 7, 2024
Exchange between
Françoise CAILLE and Radu TUIAN
around Radu TUIAN's exhibition, AFTER
and BEFORE
Françoise CAILLE, art historian, author for artists and museums [Radu
Tuian, An Urban Identity, 2015] - [Toyen, Absolute Gap, « Toyen expose à Poésie 1932, une étape vers le
surréalisme », Museum of Modern Art of the
City of Paris, March 2022 - July 2022]
Radu TUIAN, painter, last exhibition in April 2024,
Galerie du Havre, Ars-en-Ré
Radu Tuian, what is the common thread of this series "After and
Before"? It seems to refer to a notion of inverted time. Is it an
invitation to analyse the elaboration of your paintings and the succession of
different layers that the viewer is led to perceive backwards, hence the words
of Charline von Heyl* that you quote?
Yes, it is indeed an inverted
perception of time, as suggested by the title of my exhibition, a time that has
lost its linear character. In this exhibition, one can discover both recent
paintings and older works, spanning a period of approximately ten years, which
have never been exhibited before. This constellation of works is the result of
a unified artistic journey that acts as a guiding thread within a formal
diversity. Thus, the back-and-forth movement in time, a play between the before
and the after, affirms the continuity of an endless story. The paintings then
present themselves as stages of a journey, each constituting a station on this
pilgrimage.
I work with images and photos
that I have been accumulating for years, which constitutes another aspect of my
practice. Some of them become fully digital works. These images, found randomly
on the internet or captured during my "creative walks," intrigue and
appeal to me. I appropriate them, work on them, dissect them. I photograph
details of my own paintings, and then revisit them. The meaning of all these
actions emerges in the end. When I discovered Charline von Heyl's text*, I
immediately recognized something familiar in her approach. My stated objective
is to build a space-time where silence, doubt, listening, and observation is
possible.
*("We discover a painting slowly,
in stages. What you see first will not be what you see last, and you will never
find your way back—the path is already hidden behind you as you move
forward." - Charline von Heyl / UCLA Hammer Talk, May 5, 2011.
Rosy Cheeks (Daily Journal #9), 2024, oil on canvas, 117 × 90 cm
Your
pictorial work appears, at first glance, decidedly abstract, but in your
paintings, the viewer can perceive or project fragments of reality. What is
your position regarding this hybridization?
I recognize this
process of hybridization as a creative force that stimulates change, pushing
towards new solutions. It's a principle that allows the fusion of traditions,
practices, beliefs, and cultures. We inhabit a complex world, and I try to find
the representation that corresponds to it.
I feel close to Jean Baudrillard's* idea
of simulacrum. According to him, the simulacrum is a form of abstraction. In
the simulated or hyper-real world we live in, the boundary between
representation and underlying reality blurs.
In my painting from 2012 entitled
"Saeco Reefs, you're just an empty shell," one can see an
anthropomorphic element, a shape reminiscent of a broken sword, flying pieces,
a ladder, etc. This is like child's play for me. The evoked images are not
meant to tell a story. They are fragments of reality interacting, pictorial
objects, empty shells, bacteria, or viruses that define a state of mind,
perhaps unease.
*(Jean Baudrillard
develops his theory of the simulacrum in his work entitled "Simulacra and
Simulation" published in 1981. It is in this book that he asserts that the
simulacrum can be considered as a form of abstraction.)
Color is
sometimes background, sometimes form, sometimes trace, often less foundational
to the image than the line, which produces movement. Can you describe how the
image is structured when it emerges on the canvas?
I often
start with the end and look for my starting point. I assert pictorial elements
that should be in the foreground by pushing them into the background. I delve
into the background of the painting and bring back vestiges to the surface of
the canvas. I don't create; I discover in the practice of painting. My visual
subjects are born like this, in a "slow action painting" made of
action and contemplation. The line produces movement, indeed. The thicker the
line, the more it becomes a form. I let the canvas find its logic, follow its
path. If I impose a form, a color, it's to give a new impetus to the painting,
to create a new dynamic, the classic "Push and Pull" that Hans
Hofmann* talked about in the 1940s and 1950s.
*(Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter and influential art
teacher. He is known for his contributions to abstract expressionism and for
his teaching methods. Hofmann developed his theory of "push and pull"
while teaching at his art schools in both Germany and the United States. He
believed that the illusion of depth and space in a painting could be achieved
by the interaction of colors and shapes, pushing some elements forward while
pulling others back. This theory emphasizes the dynamic interplay between
colors, forms, and spatial relationships within a composition, creating a sense
of movement and depth.)
How does
your connection to nature intervene in your work? Does it play a role in the
creative process, or is it anchored more in form, colour, material, gesture?
The
opposition between nature and culture loses its relevance in a hybrid world. I
live near the sea, between the island of Ré in France and the island of
Favignana in Sicily. The sea is a tangible reality in my life, plastic and
chemicals dumped by humans unfortunately are part of it. This is a concrete
example of "nature" that inspires me. I am not inspired by an ideal
world that does not exist, nor by the superficial well-being that obsesses us,
as if denial could save us from upcoming conflicts or from the ongoing climate
collapse. Then, to answer your question, all you have to do is get to work,
which happens in form, color, material, gesture...
The
titles of your paintings seem to evoke images. At what point do they impose
themselves on you? Do they have a real connection, in your mind, with the
representation, or are they rather linked to an emotion, a memory, a later look
that you place on the created work?
My
titles are personal notations. They are there to complicate the task, to
mislead us. The logic of painting is not the same as that of speech. Painting
has its own logic, and we follow it rather than imposing rules on it that are
foreign to it. We propose possible paths, we come with our heads full of ideas,
but if we don't listen to what the painting wants of itself, we are quickly
lost. It's a bit like the conquistadors lost in the Amazon jungle in Werner
Herzog's film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Two
paintings (Juno Lark’s Slumber and Lark’s Slumber) present a cross shape. Is it
for you a simple formal interest that imposed itself, or is it the cultural
symbol that prevailed, the sleep evoked in the title then being that of death?
It's
simply a formal interest! I was looking for centrality, and today I seek the
periphery, the margin, the frontier. The dialectic between interior and
exterior is a real subject for me. I must add that the central symbol you speak
of in my painting is there to be deconstructed or multiplied. Everything is
multiple and simulacrum in this painting. Only sleep endures, indeed.
(J.L.S.)
Juno-Lark’s Slumber –2020, acrylic and oil on canvas, 176 x 148 cm
Eros
Selavi is of course a nod to Marcel Duchamp's work, Rrose Selavy, a pun that
means nothing other than "Eros is life." Red then takes on a strong
meaning here. Was Duchamp an inspiration for you, and how did this influence
act as he himself abandoned painting? Is this work a tribute that you pay him?
Yes,
it's a sensual painting: the central form, the lace, the tiger skin motif...
The nod to Duchamp is obvious. He was interested in questioning artistic and
linguistic conventions. When I say that I start with the end, it has a personal
meaning: I began my life as an artist at 20 by abandoning painting. I was
interested in photography, objects, conceptual art, installation. I resumed and
abandoned painting several times in my life. This circular movement around a
center of interest characterizes me.
This nod
to Duchamp influences my perception of the painting Rosy Cheeks, because in
1959, he made a work entitled With my Tongue in my Cheek, which means "At
the second degree." Did you think about it?
No, I
regret to say I didn't think about it. However, I regret it because it fits
well with my vision of the painting as you present it. The notion of second
degree of modernism is another formative element of my own artistic approach.
Duchamp fascinated me, and he fascinates me even more today in the context of
the Moderns that Bruno Latour talks about to define the world of before.
Duchamp is the epitome of modernity, the enfant terrible of modernism. Latour
talks about the Modern by representing it as a character with a forked tongue,
speaking at both the first and second degrees at the same time, a trickster.
Bruno Latour talks about a world of before, characterized by the separation of
nature and culture, the separation between facts and values, and total trust in
progress and scientific rationality; and the world we live in today is of a
complex and interconnected reality, a hybrid world. We find ourselves plunged
into post-post-post-post-Modernism, therefore at the Xth degree compared to the
initial second degree, Duchamp's "tongue in cheek." (A world where
the first degree is covered by the second degree, then the whole covered by an
infinite number of degrees simultaneously, so there we are in painting.) In my
2022 painting, Two Faced, I deal with the duality of appearances.
(Bruno
Latour - "We Have Never Been Modern: An Essay in Symmetrical
Anthropology" and - "Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology
of the Moderns")
Two Faced, 2022, acrylic
on wood, 55 ×46 cm
You say you're inspired by
nature, or rather by representations of nature (photos, images). Do you not
have other sources of inspiration, such as literature, as suggested by the
title Brave New World, an allusion to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?
Everything inspires me! I was
born into a society as Aldous Huxley describes in his dystopian novel Brave New
World. Utopianism is the driving force of humanity, such as going to Mars, but
it's also destructive in terms of human lives, like the ongoing wars today were
glorious fictions, “story-tellings”, clash until death.
I must add at the end that
I'm not structured in terms of ideas, of thought. I jump from one thing to
another with a disconcerting nonchalance. I don't claim to be an intellectual;
I'm a painter who is interested in the world he lives in. I'm made up of fragments,
of snippets of realities (as you mentioned in one of your previous questions),
of pieces of different constitutive cultures that I try to piece together, to
unify. This characterizes my work as well. The Japanese have made an
art of piecing together broken pieces with precious metal wire, Kintsugi. The
fractures, the fissures have become scars that confer a new beauty on the
object.
In a three-dimensional work from 1985, I used a crude bolt to force together, like
impaling on a barbecue skewer, a piece of granite and a photo of the Wheel of
Fortune with a surface painted in Klein blue beside it. I was trying to amalgamate incompatible elements, but I
still thought in dichotomous terms characteristic of modernism. The transition
from one world to another was laborious for me. Literally, the passage from the
Old World to the New World, from my native Romania to the United States, from
East to West. The fall of the wall was the passage to the world of today, this
interesting world we live in. "May you live in interesting times" is
a Chinese curse and the title of the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Wheel of Fortune, 1989, granite, steel, photography and blue pigment on wood,
60 x 60 ×30 cm
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