KVT – Black to Black

Below is the unabridged version of KVT’s piece on the Pierre Fava exhibition on at L’Espace until 17 May 2011. A shorter version appeared in the WORD Hanoi, which has just hit the streets. Watch for Hanoi Grapevine’s new monthly column in The WORD Hanoi.

Black to Black

One of my favorite works at this year’s Singapore Biennale was an installation of huge, hand-embroidered banknotes by Chinese artists Shao Yinong and Muchen. In a very brief audio presentation Shao Yinong said that:

“Art is meant to be felt…not experienced in words”.

I call this the VISCERAL EFFECT and when I walk into an exhibition or see a painting that makes my stomach muscles tighten, I know that I’m onto something good. I guess they contract because I breathe out a silent WOW! Or NICE!
Others experience it with goose bumps or a prickly sensation at the nape of their necks….I guess some even have a toe curl.

You could say it’s a bit orgasmic.

Over three days last week at the Biennale I had a few visceral moments varying from a sharp pelvic wall contraction to a sudden tightening of the transverse abdominus to a constraining of the rectus abdominus (for the physiologically illiterate they’re the basis for the abs or 6 pack that I’ve never been able to develop).

This month the exhibition area at L’Espace is featuring canvasses by French artist Pierre Fava. In the PR to an exhibition he had at The Agora Gallery in New York in 2008, Fava cites as his influences artists whose works have given me a lots of visceral twinges when I’ve seen them in their metaphoric flesh. I mean, anyone with a skerrick of artistic soul has to have a real toe curl when confronted with a huge white canvas by Franz Kline with its structural black marks slashing through. An ‘ultra black’ by Pierre Soulages can make the hairs on the back of your neck start to stand on end as you stand in front of one as if a was a mirror, and savor that almost erotic, lonesome experience. The lyrical abstractionists paintings by French Canadian Jean Paul Riopelle, with their thick impastos sparkling with emergences of vivid color, can be nose twitching stuff. (As an aside I have to admit that it was his partner Joan Mitchell’s work that got me into diaphragmatic heavy breathing mode at art school.)

Fava styles himself as a self taught minimalist and his ‘Black Blood’ series at L’Espace has the potential to cause a deep intake of air but, somehow, it’s their presentation that makes it a brief breath (to borrow an alliterative line from ‘HMS Pinafore’). Many canvases have been inadequately stretched or affixed to their stretchers and their minimalist lines are visually disturbed.

Soulages seems to be the dominant ghost behind Fava’s L’Espace work but whereas Soulages used layers of thick black paint to dig and etch into to create smooth and rough textures that absorb or reject light and that change black into other subtle shades, Fava appears to have favored the application of thin layers of black and then apply a sheen to some. The shine reflects rather than absorbs light and has none of that mesmeric, deep pool feel that they seem to need. In the cold hard light of day there’s an industrial glibness to them, rather than an organic tension.

Fava scrawls and textures swathes of dull black across sections of some, and this lies on top like material deposited onto a field rather than energy emerging from primordial depths. Scarlet slashes speed across most canvasses like sprays of fresh blood…or prophetic comets… whereas I wanted to read it as gore rising and being revealed through deep darkness. But that’s just me in gothic mode!

The dominant work when you enter the gallery is a geometric piece with those hard edges that modern artists so effectively and effortlessly create using masking tape. It seems to be at odds with its siblings. Too ordered?

Stop press: Thanks to a performance of Jacques Brel songs by that wonderful diva, Mouron, I was able to see the canvasses at 10pm in a semi-lit, semi-deserted space and they started to work some visceral magic on me. Quite a knee tremble it was! Gothic to the max! I realized why I am so often drawn towards minimalist black canvasses and their dense intensities.

I’ve decided that I could get hooked on his stuff, particularly as seen here.

PS: the banknotes in Singapore were black, embroidered with shades of grey and hung on a ceiling to floor, folding meandering river of sheer black gossamer. Black magic!