All the mornings of the world (Published on the occasion of the eponym exhibition held in 2023 at La Patinoire Royale/Galerie Valerie Bach, Brussels)
One winter morning in the large oval courtyard of a building, I noticed that the shadow of the construction had drawn, together with the sun, shapes on the lawn. A very clear line distinguished on one side of the yard the frozen grass that the sun's rays never reached, and on the other, the grass that knew the heat and the thaw during the day. One was bright green, while the other remained white day and night. Without knowing why, the sight of this phenomenon, repeated several times, intrigued me deeply.
It wasn't until a few days later that I understood why the experience of that little patch of grass with its sun-dappled colors had made such an impression on me. What had held me back that day, above that little patch of grass, was the same thing that sometimes holds us back in front of a painting. The work seems to want to reveal an omen, so we stay and wait in front of the canvas. We scrutinize it. If it's a good painting, our gaze never tires of roaming the same spaces indefinitely, always discovering something new. It doesn't matter how complex the motifs are, or even if they're present. What counts is the foreboding, or rather, the feeling of something to come.
The verbalization of painting is accompanied by several paradoxes: Because it is an opening, the painting shows us the invisible. This is a first paradox.
A second paradox consists in the fact that the being within the painting exists only as an escape. You can only be there if you are in motion. Now, movement is modification of being. Thus, to be in painting is to be already absent.
In Regard, Parole, Espace (1973), the French philosopher Henri Maldiney (1912-2013) wants to undertake the understanding of the work of art from itself, in its donation in space and time. It is a question of considering the work in that it constitutes itself, but not on its own, and no longer in that it would be constructed by our intention of signification (in the sense of Husserlian consciousness).
If, according to Maldiney, the artistic moment occurs in a completely elemental reality, it is nonetheless an event: it arises because it is different from the flow of things. And yet, by a certain strangeness, the work seems to have always been there. The masterpiece will be the evidence that overwhelms us. That's the way it's always been. The surprise of new paintings is an astonishment that doesn't make us jump, but draws us into the meanders of its being, which is also what makes it curious. Maldiney places the primacy of the artistic object, its pre-eminence, in its materiality; that is, even before it is an object in its own right, since this requires the objectifying relationship of a subject. He believes that the work of art possesses its own structures that elude and even disarm the intentionality of the subject who observes it.
Mouffe's painting embodies this relationship to being. His paintings materialize a multiplicity contained and united within the canvas. Each thin layer of acrylic blends into the next, so much so that a seemingly mauve canvas is simultaneously green and red. Temporality is essential here, because the canvas is not purple then green and red depending on where the eye is looking. It is both uniquely mauve, and both green and red at the same time. Inevitably, the relationship maintained by the volume and the surface of the paintings contributes to the same organic and paradoxical quality. The metal bars attached to the wooden frame and which underlie the canvas are shaped in such a way as to apply sufficient pressure to deform it. The volumes thus created stretch the painting in depth, and the lines of metal that can be guessed behind the canvas transform it into a sculpture as soon as they touch. The painting then extends to go beyond itself and, in a forward flight, joins the gaze that observes it.
In view of this, the monumental painting Cornerposts into the fog (Nebel) (2021), from the series of the same title, occupies a special status in Mouffe's painting. In this canvas, the structures of the paint are more visible than in the other series and certain brushstrokes are even explicit. Without totally blending into each other, the shades of blue and ocher stand out. The two volumes permeating the canvas seem to bear witness to this duality which cancels itself out as soon as it appears. Because the appearance of these lines does not cause any bursting of the body of the canvas. Although the gaze can identify and distinguish colors, the painting remains unitary.
To understand this, it may be useful to apprehend the understanding of the work as that of a living organism, obeying its own internal laws. The work of art appears as if the internal links which constitute it were necessary, and it is the necessity of the links between the parts which makes it an organism. Like the living, the work is an uninterrupted self-generation.
Between 1589 and 1591, the Italian philosopher and Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote a short treatise on links, entitled De Vinculis in genere. Burned alive for his contribution to physics and the understanding of an infinite universe, he could also have been part of the "series of the shot" that Mouffe painted from 2018 onwards, when he moved to Formentera and rediscovered the traces of those shot during Francoism.
Giordano Bruno makes the notion of the link, which unites and associates things, a principle for understanding the relationships maintained by the things of the world in general and creates by this gesture a true philosophy of the link. He poses in this a surprisingly contemporary gesture, that of thinking the world from the links that unite things, from their relationships, and not only from things understood in isolation. If the worlds are infinite and the universe chaotic, the links are what allow the forms to exist, to distinguish themselves from the undifferentiated flow. Thus, the artist is the one who binds through his art, and the singularity of a work emanates from its relationship with what it binds.
Much later, in his attempt to highlight the irreducibility of the work in relation to human consciousness, Maldiney does not make a dichotomous opposition between the object and the subject of consciousness. On the contrary, he suspends the polarity between man and the world, because the coexistence of man and the world is inalienable.
In The False Dilemma of Painting (1953), he writes:
"We and the world are moving together towards our depths (...) and the abstraction of modern art is an attempt to tear ourselves away through rhythm from the intellectualization and mechanization of modern man and his universe."
To access Mouffe's painting, we need to return to feeling for its own sake.
This is the gesture made by German neurologist Erwin Straus (1891-1975) when he realized the hyletic phenomenology that Husserl had merely announced. By emphasizing feeling for its own sake, Straus' contribution was to provide more fertile access to aesthetic experience. Sensory experience is no longer relegated to the status of an immature stage in the process of knowledge, one that must be overcome by intellectualization. Straus distances himself from the Husserlian concept of the object, preferring sensing as such, i.e., insofar as it is caught up in a relationship in which subject and object have not yet been distinguished. Just as contemporary philosophy has made consciousness a retrospective construct of our experience, so the object as intentional is relegated to a secondary position. It is not, in its intentionality, a constitutive part of the primary relationship to the world. In other words, the forms of the painting only become object a posteriori, not from the outset.
To experience Mouffe's painting is to relate to this primordial form of an object not yet constituted as such. What makes it an artistic object is not only the materially determined and conscious thing, but the primary and unspeakable relationship with it, which, in turn, transforms us. By making the sensory experience of Mouffe's paintings, we are witnessing a disarmament of intentional consciousness by the thing itself. In his paintings, an advent of the distant is felt: the deployment of depths is never flattened. The painted space is always real, and reveals itself in appearance because it escapes fixity.
In this sense, to try to determine a work by a structure in fixed points is to be, already, late in relation to the origin of seeing. The temporality of the work is never acquired in that the artistic moment acts according to a seeing and not a seen: it is part of a continuity and not in a defined past that one could point the finger at. The notion of time implies the dynamic character of the aesthetic experience, which cannot be fixed. Among the chaos, ambiguity is the only way to regain the unity of painting.
This is also what makes it difficult to talk about it because, as Mouffe shows us, the mode of being of aesthetic experience is in fact pre-theoretical and pre-linguistic. A primordial tension irrevocably animates the canvas. Otherwise, the work would be flat, as if faithful to the form and the limits of its materiality. The sole purpose of Mouffe's work is the journey of its own constitution, and this is its very being. In a way, the work is only completed by the artist when it is capable of never reaching completion, understood here in the sense of a fixed end. The painter's work ends when the - in this sense definitive - separation of the brush from the canvas coincides with the birth of the work as a work. If we take this definition literally, it means that a painter never paints a work of art. The advent of the work excludes the painter, and the true artist is the one who knows how to withdraw to let it be.