When asked to attempt a link between Rémy Zaugg and John Giorno and their treatment of text in painting, Xavier Douroux provides a framework of reading which goes beyond similarities, to bring forward principles of differentiation. He says if “John Giorno and Rémy Zaugg are both artists with formal particularities, it seems to me they come from and go to two different places.”(1) If the logic of the visual arts and their demands sets the scene for likeness, the logic of differentiation would find its origin in their initial relation to language: “Zaugg comes from painting and Giorno from poetry. Zaugg is anything but a poet.” In this perspective a word in painting would be considered differently according to its initial belonging. Beyond the fact that this sets up a distinction within the global esthetic framework, the division re-establishes two logics, that of the word and that of the image. Poetry become painting sees its word “enlarged” in a formal proposition which is but the medium.(2) The pictorial proposition supposes an immediateness where the word and formula are principally images, says Xavier Douroux, where “the painting remains a mystery in its capacity to bring forth images.” These present the pictorial as imposing itself onto the logic of the senses. In this context, the well-known emblematic “When the snow melts, where does the white go?” leads us to a moment of extinction where all seems to be abolished, the readable into an erasure of contrast and the visible into whiteness and its resonance. The force of ambiguity can be noted, where the painting by Zaugg on the borderline of readability evokes the genesis of the visible.(3) The framework bringing out the dialectic between the readable and the visible, attemps to reveal, if not an answer, an area of connection between opposites which would try, in meeting, to express their respective foundations. In this context is the formula reversible? Could we say that the edge of visibility evokes the genesis of the readable? Then, we’d have to turn to another type of relation beween the arts where the poet would break up the sign as far as abolishing legibility. That’s what is found for example with Michaux, Artaud and more recently Matthieu Messagier. But in that case we may think that the text preceded the image. It’s within this context that the work of Jérôme Conscience takes on an interesting turn. His procedure fits in with the reconstruction of text and also comes from an anti-poetic progression. Anti-poetry understood not as a rejection of poetry but as the indication of origins reveals more about the visible than about the readable. His installations put things into relation, photography (always seeming repetitive) and various objects (from burned car to kneeling stool, bed with feminine trimmings) which appear as the heart of his work on canvasses and panels of different formats, essentially monochromatic and always bearing text. With these connections the written paintings play on confrontation. They appear as so many elements of a language under construction, which could be understood as an Esperanto elaborating itself on the vestiges of language. What Jérôme Conscience’s writing leads us to, through his visual realization, is the simple question of possible meaning. The questions arising from these paintings can be brought down to the prosaic ones each individual asks, facing strangeness. What’s he talking about? What’s he telling me?
It can be noted that this strangeness is born of a close proximity. Thus the puns evoke simple language games but what makes them efficient is that in a wink they are sent back to an ironic reading. This is to be found, for example, in the diversions with a sexual tone, which skip from sauciness to another level of questioning. The same phenomenon operates for example in FOUS RIEZ [FOOLS LAUGH] where the explicit word play (homonymy NDLT) becomes a proposition receivable in the universe of Fourier. In this way the work of Jérôme Conscience manages a double extraction, one towards the logics of common sense that offers an instant reading, then goes further to another level of interpretation, which can be seen as the true target. This is again to be noticed in the Latin expressions which at first evoke the practical use of dictionaries and their customary pink pages. On a second level they underline the disappearance of a world of language that only painting and
certainly not teaching might save. What does a Carpe Libiditatem say in a Decaux lollipop? These two things: a recognition of our matrix tongue and a subversive call to pleasure. We’ll see it is Latin, that we don’t understand, and we’ll measure the distance separating us from our roots. As for the subtility of the language, only the connaisseur will know. For the others, to recognize beauty there where words are written is enough to create the basis for questioning that comes to tell us words mean something.
A reference to the traditional art of calligraphy is more or less implicit. It is the esthetic wager of these finely executed paintings, signing an obvious clarity, where language is presented sober. Beneath this sobriety, movement will be born from the language and the confusion it introduces. The readable comes to stir up the visible. And this tells us that what moves the visible is its readability. The function of spectator becomes one of reader. But what’s to be read can be confusing and plunge one back into the perplexity of the visible. Whereas in earlier works the artist used colours which dissected words creating sequences, today contrast is shown between words and their translation. In one work, created in 2005 for a collective exhibition called The Bartholdi Axis: Spirit of Liberty, Jérôme Conscience proposes a diptych, two white panels with the same inscription in two languages, English and Arabic, The Lion of Liberty. Beyond the explicit reference to Bartholdi’s New York creation, we are shown the contrast between two written forms, two different appropriations of the world through language. The idea will become more precise later in the introduction of juxtapositions, notably and principally from Hebrew; beyond the juxtaposing of languages lie different appropriations, manners of grasping the world; a kind of landscapes. Marked by the form of the language, they seem to fit into a nomen- clature close to geopolitics (example The people of Israel lives) but beyond what could seem a catch-line to the present-day, something else is becoming apparent, which refers more to painting than to words. It consists in the perspective of depth. What makes up the landscape is not the pure and simple reproduction of a surface but of the ground’s relief. The play on languages relates not only transversality and surface connections (the interplay of translations) but at the same time a verticality where this linking of languages can be seen as a suggestion of delving into the ancient past, Latin and Hebrew, something pertaining to origins, while the people of Israel lives denotes their permanance in contemporaneity. We may have here a possible answer to Rémy Zaugg’s painting seeing the white melt back down into the depths, Jérôme Conscience runs along that flow, clinging to the framework of language.
But suddenly another world comes into view, it escapes painting, turns away from the visible and towards what it is supported by: the readable. We can think that when painting uses words it’s to give them visibility before providing a framework which allows them to find their place, readability. Especially when question of Hebrew, this one oscillates between origins and the Sacred. But then other forces are called upon, those that Gershom Scholem perceives, those of reading, the moment when a viewer turns into an other.(4) Of this “other,” the title chosen by Derrida evokes the ambiguous position and expresses a different logic of articulation leading up a new path, that of language’s eyes.
Louis Ucciani, philosopher, teaches at the University of Bourgogne – Franche-Comté, 2016
(1) Xavier Douroux in “Novo” no. 37, Jan. 2016, on the Rémy Zaugg exhibition, Dijon Consortium
(2) «John Giorno is a poet, almost a poet of diction, of expression, who suddenly uses the enlargement of a painting to bear a message.»
(3) Béatrice Josse, notice on Zaugg’s painting for the Regional Contemporary Art Fund of Lorraine
(4) Referral to Derrida’s work on the subject, based on Gershom Scholem’s texts, in «The Eyes of language, the abyss and the volcano,» Paris, Galilée, 2012