{"id":10846,"date":"2017-12-11T23:32:34","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T22:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/?p=10846"},"modified":"2020-05-26T19:10:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T17:10:12","slug":"interviews-tissot-bernadette-costa-prades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/interviews-tissot-bernadette-costa-prades\/","title":{"rendered":"I \u2013 Conversation about \u2026 painting – Christophe Tissot & Bernadette Costa-Prades"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Interviews with Christophe Tissot
\nand the writer and journalist Bernadette Costa-Prades<\/h4>\n

I \u2013 Conversation about \u2026 painting<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Painting, a sign language\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/em>The painter should not talk, bequeathing just his painting. Once he starts talking, he gives away something of his function,\u00a0which is to let other people appreciate his picture, or not, as the case may be.\u00a0It seems to me that to say too much about the work confines and shrivels its potential, as if stuffing it (like a taxidermist).\u00a0I am suspicious of the artist who stipulates that such and such a message must be seen in his painting, and nothing else.\u00a0So what can I say about my own painting ? I prefer being a polyglot. In that way, words never totally hem it in.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing to be seen in it<\/span>
\n<\/em>Daniel Arasse puts his finger on a basic fact : we see nothing, we are in absolute darkness,\u00a0we only see the image that our brain has seen fit to re-create, behind our eyes in a way. What is more, our brain can only decipher a minute part of the vibratory field. Between infra-reds and ultra-violets, there are worlds that are invisible to our eye, which should have the effect of making us modest\u2026\u00a0Thanks to art and poetry, however, we try to broaden our spectrum of vision and understanding.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Letting people imagine<\/span>
\n<\/em>Forty years later, I can still recall the words of one of my teachers: \u201cIf you have a floor cloth, don\u2019t throw it in my face.\u201d\u00a0Herein lies one of the painter\u2019s basic questions : does he toss at visitors a canvas that will really impress them, in every sense of the word, or will he let people imagine ?\u00a0What part does he give to the message ? If he is just in\u00a0the mode of\u00a0pure intentionality, he will produce a propaganda picture.\u00a0Art has too often been used to deliver slogans. \u00a0There is another way of attracting the customer by whispering to him :\u00a0Come and have a look, come and see how pretty my image is<\/em>\u2026\u00a0Starting from there, art finds itself re-incorporated in a commercial market circuit.\u00a0For me, one of the really useful things about art is what I call the\u00a0exhaust<\/em>,\u00a0that invisible part which, over time, gradually broadens our way of seeing things,\u00a0and acts as a\u00a0developer (in the photographic sense).\u00a0From the Chauvet Cave to the present day, we should do our best, in the face of that beautiful legacy from the past, to modestly add our own stone.\u00a0And avoid toppling into the orgy of the art market, which has warped everything, giving exorbitant\u00a0sums of money\u00a0to works which are not basically useful.\u00a0Not all works, of course, but, where some are concerned, we are entitled to wonder what they really contribute to widening our vision.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>The excesses of Conceptual Art\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/em>The ubiquity of Conceptual Art attests to the ubiquity of a form of thinking. Our culture of output turns its back on sensibility and imagination.\u00a0It has created an invisible, subtle production line, which keeps us in a state of ignorance, passiveness and obedience. \u00a0From my angle, a certain kind of Conceptual Art is not liberating, and Conceptual works do not make us dream.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>The age of disillusionment<\/span>
\n<\/em>In this age I see the consequences of the First World War, and its traumas\u00a0rarely or never talked about.\u00a0History books invariably serve one and the same argument\u2014heroes, the field of honour\u2026\u00a0People are forever doctoring the facts, generation after generation, while all that butchery has had serious consequences for art,\u00a0involving a form of nihilism, in particular the idea that beauty does not exist.<\/p>\n

Conceptual Art has underpinned that shock wave, that trauma, and come up with the idea that\u00a0we look at terror.\u00a0There has been a totalitarian trend among certain Conceptual artists, for whom the keyword was transgression, becoming something akin to a religion.\u00a0The mere fact of uttering a criticism made you guilty of having a bourgeois vision of art, and painting was suddenly declared decadent, and anti-revolutionary\u2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Towards a new movement\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/em>My answer to that tendency ? Carrying on my work, existing come what may, and hoping that I am not alone.\u00a0When an artist offers an authentic work, that work encounters its public. Conceptual artists won\u2019t stop this movement.\u00a0Under my belt I\u2019ve got thirty years of reading, reflection, painting, and resistance, and it seems to me that there are more and more of us today who are keen to shift to another phase.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/h5>\n
Bernadette Costa Prades is a writer and journalist.\u00a0She has published two biographies of Frida Kahlo and Niki de Saint Phalle with Libretto,\u00a0and the biography of Tina Modotti, with Editions Philippe Rey. \u00a0In her books she enjoys shedding light on the creative process,\u00a0and the sensitive and poetic approach of artists, who often find their source in their childhood.\u00a0Her interviews with the painter\u00a0Christophe Tissot follow this same path.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h5>\n

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Caption : Christophe Tissot 2017 – s\u00e9rie Champs d\u2019oiseaux
\nEncres, craies et pigments sur papier Kraft – 1,82 cm x 1,60 cm<\/strong><\/h6>\n

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  Interviews with Christophe Tissot and the writer and journalist Bernadette Costa-Prades I \u2013 Conversation about \u2026 painting… Continue Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10846"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriecipango.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}