STORY OF THE SHAPES
The first shape appeared in 2018. I was reading Deleuze's essay on Leibniz, The Fold. Deleuze said a simple thing to define the Baroque philosophy and aesthetics: the Baroque makes folds. There is Baroque wherever matter keeps folding onto itself and where the soul keeps folding back. The shape paintings evolved as Deleuze's thoughts on Leibniz and the Baroque unfolded, but the connection between the two was obscure. The shapes did not illustrate Deleuze's singular ideas, they were a sort of synesthetic emanation.
The 19th-century French diarists, the Goncourt brothers, spoke of a "painting standing up" to describe the instant a painted image becomes a force overwhelming the viewer, what Delacroix called "the powerful silence" of painting. I think there is, in the silence of the studio, a similar experience when the motif emerges and reveals itself as the possibility of endless explorations. When this happened, the shapes were no longer images derived from Deleuze's lectures on Leibniz, they became artifacts, schemata on their own, terras incognitas or primeval deities, both vast and enwrapping, and whose colors were that of clay, stone, and sand.
The motif, a rounded rectangle, folded and folded back, allowed for a multitude of iterations. The shapes, longing to escape the plane, folding into an imaginary space to transcend their ineluctable flatness, force new outlines, draw new contours, contract and deploy within the rectangular constraint of the frame. The fold is the essence of the shape; as in Spinoza desire is the essence of man.
One day, the rounded rectangles materialized on the canvas without a fold. Everything seemed to be there: the infinity — through the optical depth of the layered paint — and its borders. The pigments were no longer the earth. I used lamp black, a pigment which, centuries ago, was made by collecting the soot deposited inside the glass of an oil lamp. Here's the night. To the lamp black, I added just enough of lead white to give it a bluish hue. The same lead white Vermeer used to paint the drops of light which illuminate his painting. Black is the primeval color, the color of the universe, the color of the infinite. Black is the night before birth and the night in the cave where painting was born.
Before the shape becomes shape, there is always a passage of chaos. The black paint flowing, running, splashing, and dripping on the canvas. As chaos reaches the outline and the layers of paint reach their maximum density, the shape appears. Chaos is contained. The formless is delineated. And within the shape, quivering glows, the evanescent and iridescent brush strokes: the folds of matter, of the holy matter, extending into infinity.
“The soul cannot all at once open up all its folds because they extend to infinity.”
EPISTEMOGRAPHY: THE DIAGRAMMATIC EXPLORATIONS
Amshel Klein.: Why epistemography?
Mikhael Levy: I needed a new word, one that sounded like a discipline, not a movement or a label. I’m weary of labels and always been suspicious of movements.
A.K.: Why a discipline then?
M.L.: When the walls are up, I am forced to dig. Otherwise, I am a drifter.
A.K.: Nothing wrong with drifting…
M.L.: Not if you are interested in knowledge. Knowledge presupposes will. The will to know.
A.K.: A vaguely Nietzschean conception…
M.L.: I realized that ever since I started painting, the two central questions have been: What do I know? and How do I know it?
A.K.: Painting as an epistemology?
M.L.: Painting, drawing, yes — as an epistemological search.
A.K.: Where does it begin?
M.L.: It begins with the datum. Visual data since we are speaking of visual arts.
A.K.: And at the origin of data?
M.L.: Data are phenomena entering a perceptual field.
A.K.: For the painter this would translate as the light hitting the retina.
M.L.: Yes. Painters deal with two visual data sets: that of nature, and that of the paint itself.
A.K.: Only when the painting is representational.
M.L.: At the renaissance began the essential problematic of painting: how to represent nature with pigment.
A.K.: How to make the skin look like skin, glass look like glass, etc…
M.L.: This was completely new. The visual artists of the Middle-Age were not scrupulous about realism. Their visual system sought to arrange symbols rather than render perfect imitations of nature. Their data set was unique. It was that of their painting.
A.K.: Did the rediscovery of Antique art draw renaissance artists to look at nature as the primary source of inspiration?
M.L.: Certainly. But I believe two events happened during the renaissance that initiated a profound change. The invention of perspective drawing and of oil painting. Two elements that greatly enhanced the ability to represent nature. Simultaneously the symbolic language became more abstract and less visible. The question of nature and its pictorial representation has occupied painters for centuries, until the advent of abstraction which relocated the data set within the pictorial framework.
A.K.: In what you described we have a progression of high symbolism/low representation to low symbolism/high representation and again high symbolism/low representation…
M.L.: Yes. Although we have to note that in the case of abstract painting, the symbolic system is a unique creation and not a language shared within a culture. The other interesting aspect of abstraction is that with the total dissolution of representation, the painting no longer refers to an event. Until Abstraction, painting always pointed to an event. Of course, the nature and the scope of the events have fluctuated, from the epic Italian frescoes to the intimate scenes of the Deutsch — but every single painting depicted an event — historical, mythical, or personal: the Entombment of Christ, the Rape of the Sabines, A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window… The abstract painting did away with the event. At the apogee of abstraction, during the Abstract Expressionist Movement, the event became painting itself. The pigments, the drippings, the splatters. The event took place at the making of the painting and the painting was no longer the representation of something that happened but rather the testimony that something had happened.
A.K.: You locate the event at the instant the painting is made.
M.L.: The painting is a visual data set, the record of a phenomenon, organized as an event. It is precisely how the world appears to us. Reality is manifested by a succession of data sets but what about the phenomenon itself — for itself and in itself? What is reality without subjectivity? Can it be like a picture without a subject?
A.K.: Was this the beginning of epistemography?
M.L.: It was, in a mysterious way. I felt I had to go beyond abstraction, beyond the percept. As always when I hit a wall, I retreated to drawing. But the goal then was not so much to understand how to draw an eyelid, a nostril, or a hand. It was not about composition either. I was not concerned about form and color, space and relation. No. I had something else in mind. How can I investigate reality with a pencil? How can a drawing, or rather a diagram, could be intercalated between a reality R and a subjectivity S? As always when you begin to research, a whole new world appears that you had never thought of. I discovered some fascinating works on diagrams. From Antiquity to the Renaissance, thinkers, and artists have sought to elaborate visual systems in which vast amounts of knowledge could be fitted, organized, and retrieved. Cicero spoke of the arrangement of thoughts in memory palaces, building complex mental structures as repositories of his knowledge. Aristotle described thinking as speculating with images. The Kabbalists of the Middle Age elaborated diagrams through which the world could be explained. Raynundus Lullus developed the Elemental Patterns which aimed to encompass all the knowledge of the world, Pico de la Mirandola, inspired by the zodiac wheel, elaborated the Ars Combinandi, conceptual sketches are found in Descartes ' Notebooks, even Kant contemplated the notion that the world can be arranged into the schema.
A.K.: The diagrammatic explorations led you back to a more formal approach based on new semiotics, the essential component of it being the triangle.
M.L.: Yes. The diagrammatic explorations produced an interesting set of concepts. Repletion, recursion, and stratification, are all manifested by the simplest geometrical element, the equilateral triangle.
A.K.: Why the triangle?
M.L.: The triangle came naturally as it is the symbol of a datum. It is a symbol for data, most likely derived from the capital greek letter delta. Although our definition of data differs from what the term is commonly used for, it was clear that the triangle offered infinite plastic possibilities. It also allows for some intriguing isometric projection — the fascinating power of isometric projection can be a topic of our next conversation…
A.K.: Let’s go back to the triangle and its recursions. In some of the works, the mechanic repetition of a triangle forms a stratum.
M.L.: We will have to meet again to discuss the concept of stratification. It is getting late…
A.K.: In just a few words…
M.L.: I liken our perceptual system to a grid, let’s call it the perceptual grid. A grid has two variables, density, and plasticity. Anyone can play mentally with these two variables to evaluate to what measure they affect subjectivity. Data bombard the perceptual grid. This constitutes the most primordial stratum in our relation to Reality, one that only requires senses and not subjectivity. This primordial stratum is heterogenous, granular, and ragged.
A.K.: Is the primordial stratum where reality manifests itself?
M.L.: Not as the figure that a sculptor is carving out of the block of marble but as the chips of stone falling on the floor, the tinkle of the hammer on the chisel. Making sense of the world would be like reconstructing a block of marble from the chips that have fallen on the floor, working inside out, around the contour of the missing figure until the block is made block again, without the possibility of ever knowing what the figure looked like. There lies the infinite question of the human condition which forces us to live not only knowing that the whole is unknown, but that it is unknowable. Something along those lines…
ON ATOPIA AND MONOCHROME BLUE PAINTINGS
Conversation with Amshel Klein
Miami, July 12, 2014.
Amshel Klein : What is the origin of the Monochrome Blue paintings?
Mikhael Levy : The Monochrome Blue Paintings come from the experiments I made when I was working with ink, and walnut stain on Arches paper. I wanted to transpose the phenomena that were happening on the paper to large formats. But large sheets of rag paper are hard to come by.
A.K.: You made some attempts to translate these “phenomena” as you said on canvas.
M.L.: Yes, in the course of 2003-4, I wanted to replace paper with canvas. However, the canvas did not offer the same properties as paper. They had a stiffening effect on the ink. I tried many different ways of priming the surface. I tried ancient formulas with dead plaster, rabbit skin glue, honey, and chalk. All the experiments failed. I aimed not to replicate the surface of a cold pressed paper on the surface of the canvas, but rather gather the elements that will allow certain phenomena to happen.
A.K.: Can you explain what you mean by phenomena?
M.L.: When I speak of phenomena I allude to discreet events that take place on the surface, events determined by the natural properties of the elements — namely pigments dispersed in a fluid medium, the air, the very molecular property of matter interacting on a surface.
A.K.: Is the molecular property of matter part of the process of painting?
M.L.: It’s rather the tension that forms between the eyes and the hand in relation to the matter and the surface… The hand, the eye, the matter, and the surface — are the four components by which the main Event happens.
A.K.: The main Event being the image…
The Main Event is the crystallization of the Image. The hand, the eye, the matter, the surface. It is how these four components, these four modulations will play in the mind of the painter as a fugue. The activation of these four voices allows the fait pictural. If it doesn’t happen, there is nothing. There’s a failure. In the act of painting, there is, there must be a time of tumult, an instance where all the voices expand to create germinal chaos, graze disaster, and a feeling of hopelessness. This is why it is so hard to go to the studio and begin painting. Because the painter prefigures the disaster to come.
A.K.: You speak of the act of a painting as a Fugue.
M.L: Playing Bach on the piano produces formidable intuitions. Yes, the hand has its voice. The paint has its voice. Nature has its voice. The surface has its voice. All in the painter’s mind. Four modulations in the vortex of which operate the Deleuzian diagram: invisible forces made visible to the mind. The passage into chaos allows the erasure of the predetermined, the obliteration of the representation composed along the lines of a pre-established schema. But a painting exists only if the painter is able to delineate chaos, to prevent chaos from taking over. It is a fight of cosmic dimension, a fight against the abyss. The painter oscillates between renunciation, surrender, or awe. It is, in the end, either ecstasy or defeat. In this chaos, when the will retires, the authentic act of painting happens, or rather the non-act of painting is allowed to happen, a respite from the will. The many voices fuse in a unifying silence, that of the image, forming for itself and by itself. It is in this exhausting context that painting arises. Emerging from the germinal chaos is the great moment of the act of painting, a cathartic cosmogony, the gushing of a world followed by the immediate temptation of either its erasure or its acceptance, but rarely its celebration. Paul Valery said that a work of art is never finished but abandoned. A painting stands only because it has defeated the painter in a way that has exhausted the will to paint. The fugue ended, and no voice prevailed. Plato considered contemplation as the highest state humans were capable of… Yes, contemplation yields to the beholding of truth, beyond speech, beyond thought. I believe painting allows this contemplative state to be reached, through silence, through stillness. That is the essence of painting.
