CROSSWALK

Pat Andrea

Nazanin Pouyandeh - Simon Pasieka - Pat Andrea

5, rue du Mail 75002

Simon Pasieka and Nazanin Pouyandeh are former students of Pat Andrea, from whom they inherited a certain sense of freedom: Pat did not impose anything on his students but gave them the tools to do what they wanted to do. This gentle, horizontal mode of transmission seems to be the condition for teaching art through art, where artistic individuality is revealed rather than learned. Pat, Simon and Nazanin are members of what one might call an "artistic family". To the singular vision of each is applied the contacts of the others: support, encouragement, impression. In his De Rerum Natura, Lucretius analyzes the declination of atoms, which gives them the ability to deviate from their intended trajectory and allows them to combine to form more complex objects. Painting within an "artistic family" could be compared to this deviation where the direct or indirect influence of artists is added as a load of glances to the practice of others, deviating always a little more from its point of arrival. This articulation of freedom and will in painting, on the one hand, and of the necessity (or not) to make a "school", on the other, has aroused much interest among art historians, particularly Aloïs Riegl with the concept of "kunstwollen" that he developed in 1893. According to this principle, the dynamic force that animates the artists and works of a given period can be considered as the manifestation of a singular will while remaining conditioned to external factors of influence. The equation posed applies by metonymy to painting. It is, in the case of the three artists, a diegetic machine (based on the narrative) made of conduits in detour or in straight line, of more or less narrow passages, of weights which counterbalance the ethereal substances. Limited in its medium and surface, painting projects our mind-body beyond these limits; in addition to sight, painting does not renounce music, theater, sculpture, engraving and dance. It summons the senses on its sensitive surface. Also, beyond the wide range of subjects present (game, war, sport, love, religion), these paintings speak about painting. They lend themselves to a reflection on their history and their essential characteristics: the palette, the frame, the sketch and the light integrate the reality of the painting in properly pictorial means.
 
Apparently, the juxtaposition of different plasticities on the canvas has a certain mannerism and it is always possible, in Pat, Simon and Nazanin, to perceive the technicality of the medium. But the artist is never ashamed to do manual work. The only real aesthetic analogy between the pictorial systems - realist, abstract, figurative - is that they all constitute an invented form. For all that, a plastic form is not the fruit of the more or less mimetic transfer of a vision on a support. It is a conscious adjustment of something which is interior: a painting is necessarily an order. "What is opposed to the law, according to Jean Baudrillard, is not at all the absence of law, it is the rule".1
This thought, from his work on seduction, makes particular sense for the painting of Pat, Simon and Nazanin. Seduction is not an expressionist energy but a sign and a ritual: as in the theater, one adheres to the thing all the more because one knows that it takes place in a fictitious space. And the jubilant character of this painting comes largely from this consented relation to the game and the simulacrum.


Elora Weill-Engerer
 
 
 1 Jean Baudrillard, De la séduction, Paris : Galilée, 1979, p.180.