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PRESS RELEASE
Organized Postponement, Jean-Marie Bytebier
Nocturne Opening 10 september 2009, from 6 to 9 pm
11 September - 17 October 2009
Italo Calvino once said that his method consisted in eliminating everything
that was superfluous. There is a ravaging beauty in a work of art that has
been reduced to its essence. The consummate work, like a perfectly cut
diamond, is no longer held down by any ballast. It says what needs to be
said with the strictest economy of means. This is also the method that
Jean-Marie Bytebier uses. He paints and repaints his canvases until there is
nothing left that is not entirely necessary. However, in doing so, he does
not aim to create a crystalline perfection. By eliminating the superfluous
he opens up an infinity inside the image.
Jean-Marie’s paintings constantly withhold their meaning from us. His
canvases have an ambiguity that is nowhere resolved because there are no
iconographical holds at hand to ground his images.
We recognise the sky, foliage, some details that
might suggest the presence of birds or even wind, but there is nothing there
giving these images narrative content. Treetops seem to have been
indiscriminately cut off by the edge of the image. The distance between
foreground and background, between heaven and earth, is disrupted because
these canvases deny us a human measure to fathom them. The images remain
indifferent to our need for legibility. They lack all points of reference.
Therefore they take away the possibility of an ending. There is no closure
in these works. The viewer who tries to penetrate them is constantly thrown
back upon himself.
The absence of visual or narrative closure takes an image to the very edge
of abstraction, confronting the viewer with a new question concerning her
own point of view, in the sense that she must ask herself where she stands
in relation to this image. The viewer is compelled to take the elements in
the image and construct her own meaning. She must figure out for herself
where she stands, both figuratively (what does the image mean to me?) and
literally (from which vantage point can I conceive of meaning in this
image?). By constantly folding back upon themselves in this way,
Jean-Marie’s paintings generate infinite movement. Constantly shifting,
the works retain their autonomy in relation to their audience. This also
means that they cannot be consumed in a passing glance. The images demand
our attention. Jean-Marie likes to call this the third dimension is his
work: an invisibility, something that disappears in the folds of the image.
This third dimensions lies in the fact that the images are not objects, but
a dialogue that keeps repeating itself with new variations. This dialogue is
at least partly set in motion by the creation of visual hybrids: Jean-Marie
brings together elements that have no intrinsic link with each other.
If this sounds like alchemy, it is meant to,
because Jean-Marie does not bring together incongruous objects in the
surrealist way of, say, Magritte. He combines properties. For instance, the
blue of the sky will be painted over the hue of skin. The resulting tone is
an amalgam of both layers of paint, a new colour that dialectically
transcends its component parts. But not just properties create infinite
movement in these paintings. The very instruments of Jean-Marie’s painting
are involved in this process. For instance, Jean-Marie does not dilute his
colours with clear water, but with rainwater that has turned green in its
cup. This brackish water is a carrier of history: during its life cycle it
has made contact with many objects and surfaces, sliding along them and
picking up minute particles. In using this water to paint, a fetishistic
deposit of all those materials occurs in the painting. That way, an
invisible infinity is locked inside the materiality of the image. The work
is more than the sum of canvas, pigment and water, it is a reservoir of
meanings and memories, laden with hidden history.
Window frames are a central motif in Jean-Marie’s paintings. The motif was
lifted from a fresco by Fra Angelico in which the image of a small barred
window occurred. Jean-Marie integrated this image in his own paintings and
started to create variations on its theme. Frames have a double function in
his work. On the one hand they obviously frame the composition. On the other
hand they look out at what is on the other side of the window. Thus, the
frame of the painting and the window frame (which might be the subject of
the painting) are very often conflated. The result of this framing is that
the image seen through the window is set apart from its surroundings. It
becomes an enclosed area that attracts the gaze, a field of vision where the
common rules of looking no longer apply because the link with the everyday
world has been cut.
But Jean-Marie often paints not just a window frame but the very frame of
the canvas. Instead of framing his works, he paints them as framed. And once
the frame is painted around the image, he will often open it up again.
This is done in a series of canvases called Unfinished
in which either the image itself or the painted frame around it are left
unfinished. However, this suggestion of nonfinito is itself an illusion,
because Jean-Marie has really taken these paintings beyond completion. They
are not really unfinished: the Unfinished paintings are finished paintings
that have been painted over again to make them look unfinished. The actual
image has been covered by a new image that suggests a prepared but empty or
unfinished canvas containing hesitant shapes, smudges of paint and lines
that halt without purpose.
In making such seemingly unfinished works, Jean-Marie almost refrains from
painting. It seems as if he is only handing us the tools with which to
construct an image. By stressing the fact that paintings are objects made by
human hand, the image-maker himself seems to take his leave. But this is the
illusion, for the leave-taking is the image. What these paintings portray,
is the halted movement of a painter preparing his instruments and then
failing to construct the anticipated image. If any image is to appear, the
viewer will have to construct it in her mind from a vantage point she
herself is going to have to determine. The gaze only meets its own tools.
What it is hoping to see, the finished image that would give it closure, is
indefinitely postponed. Jean-Marie paints this postponement. That way, his
paintings resemble objects receding into the distance. But there is often a
moment when they seem to linger on the horizon before disappearing entirely.
It is within this fault-line between the visible and the invisible that
Jean-Marie is painting, creating images that halt time and capture the
fleeting moment of its disappearance.
Playing with time is a cinematic endeavour. Within the visual arts, painting
and cinema seem to be at opposite ends. The painter is condemned to work
within a single image, whereas the filmmaker can create endless series of
images. This makes cinema very well-suited to narration: it has an element
of duration, and duration enables the exposition of elements in time.
Painting cannot do this. That is to say: if painting wants to introduce a
temporal element, the duration must be condensed into one image. This is
exactly what Jean-Marie’s paintings do. Whether they are involving their
spectators in an endless circle of meaning or entertaining their departure
through fragmentary framing, they always lock us up in the moment. They are
an invitation and a task to take time to contemplate the inward infinity of
a moment: an elusive lapse in time that is given precarious form in
Jean-Marie’s paintings. The third dimension in these works is therefore
what it always was: depth. But it is not the depth of the visual field. It
is the depth of a moment, digging up infinity. To look at these images, is
to defer to time.
Christophe Van Eecke
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