Michel Mouffe : Shares of Nothingness, Shares of Eternity...
By Xavier Van den Broeck
Stating the obvious, Michel Mouffe's work is as luminous as it is opaque. Crystal clear though reluctant to immediate comprehension, it dwells at the fringe of our intelligence, static yet mobile, quiet but sometimes traversed by epic breath. Incandescent and silent, unquestionably modern although it secretly shivers with Cinquecento reminiscence, it is inoculated with joy and tainted with a dash of seriousness. A work related to spring, anxious not to forget the winter it was born of and conscious of the autumn it will return to, in a perpetual oxymoron combining contraries that don't molest each other. Mouffe's creation sometimes seems to be playing with itself, if not with us, combining intelligence and wit, making us more silent than talkative, more penetrated than we can penetrate those canvases-sculptures made by a mathematician who'd turned painter or a philosopher who'd swapped pens for brushes. Indeed, the painter's work, at the edge of the abyss, inevitably invites to question the essence of existence. Precisely, his paintings summon us spectators and force us, through their implacable materiality, to be present with them and therefore, with ourselves. Simply put, when confronted with a painting by Michel Mouffe, it's complicated to pretend it's not there. Because the canvas, although it is made of inanimate matter deprived from eyes and consciousness, seems to be looking at us when we are around. Clearly, the Brussels artist's works don't suddenly open the doors to the supernatural. As a matter of fact, they combine visible and invisible, a skilful articulation of presence and absence, marrying time and timelessness in an intimate symbiosis of colour and space, of matter's inertia and the vibrations that nevertheless animate it.
In a religious analogy, one could say there is a mystique that crops out at the surface of those multiple layers of paint that negate each other as much as they mutually create each other. Moreover, as we approach, appear infinite nuances that inhabit them, light grooves that organise them, abundance on the canvas, saturated yet seemingly unfinished, a world crowded with infra-world, between chaos and erudite organisation. A world that resonates with the presence of an organising power that won't say its name but only give the signs. A psychotherapist might say the tension that sometimes pushes the canvas towards the viewer is to be undoubtedly related to Freud's id, the unconscious that relentlessly taunts the subconscious, the human being's impulsive side lying in the outskirts of their conscience. It could as well be seen as the materialisation of Munch's Scream...Neither religious nor therapist and nothing more than an art critic, I simply wonder : how on Earth can Michel Mouffe achieve that ? How can his creations, blurring the limits between painting and sculpture, penetrate us more than they can be penetrated ? How, in a career originating in his teenage years, can he, half a century later, push his research-or shall we say quest- further without stumbling on repetition, on the contrary, deepening a procedure which, although relentlessly renewed, testifies of an extreme coherence?
In an attempt to answer those questions, one can put the emphasis on the perfection of an impeccably skilful artistic gesture, which never fails whatever the numerous tools or materials he uses : pencil, charcoal, pastel, brush, steel, canvas... Before the gesture, there is also the "burst" he describes as the primary source for each of his creations. Precisely, the canvases sometimes seem to be bursting into the third dimension, erupting like ghastly tablecloth stretching creases to eternity, or unfolding in immobilised time, like a densified and magnified present. There is also an infinite patience, which connects the artist to time, not the time of our clocks but the time of painting, of the painted matter and its intimate rhythms. A patience he uses as a secret guide when he covers the canvas in multiple layers or plunges them in tanks filled with paint in a profane christening, thus exploring the medium in its deeper limits, respectfully tracking down all its potentials, sometimes seemingly staying away from the creative process, sometimes adamantly involved. A true investigation, obstinate yet untroubled, tenacious but confident, supported by a profound knowledge of art, which he solidly appropriated. In the background, a guiding thread : when everything has been painted, as some have asserted, one question remains : "how do I paint ?", instead of "what do I paint ?". A question asked by Rothko, Newman, Brice Marden, Malevich, Yves Klein or, closer to us, the Belgian Marthe Wéry, who wilfully investigated the painting medium's virtuality. Those filiations are no indentifications but establish a lineage, a neighbourhood, milestones that help appropriate history of art. It is tempting to add some filmmakers to the list inasmuch as Michel Mouffe's work, as pictorial and sculptural as it is, is nonetheless very cinematographic as well. As spectators, we watch Mouffe's work the same way as Resnais's "Last Year in Marienbad", a film where temporality and narration seem to vanish to make place to reminiscence, as if, for the French filmmaker, the only reality worthy to be filmed was inside, in the brain, the place of dreams, evasion, memories. Like the French director, Mouffe offers paintings on which one can project dreams, mental narration, get unconsciously immersed, reflect and be reflected... A connection could also be found to early Jean-Luc Godard, when, instead of telling and filming a story, he decided, through innovative editing, to question the essence of filmmaking. Stanley Kubrick could also be mentioned, particularly with "2001 a Space Odyssey, as it seems there is an aesthetical, philosophical and intellectual relation between Mouffe's paintings and the bedroom where the film ends (known as "the Barmecide Feast"). The artist's work would perfectly fit in such a decor, a place of immaculate whiteness, of emptiness saturated with space, where space and time coincide in a way they appear to both create and nullify each other. A feature that can also be found in Mouffe's art : it's hard to tell whether they are a silent receptacle of time or if they incarnate space itself, as an implacable offering to the viewer's glance.
Pretty much like those film masters, the painter has will and skill to create a visual experience able to evade our intelligence to directly penetrate the unconscious. Therefore, it creates an event within, tearing apart an orderly vision of the world. In a fruitless attempt to regain comprehension, we might be tempted to watch from a different angle. Suddenly the impression changes, the work looks different, the event shifts, eager to remain elusive, intangible, which provokes something close to cognitive discordance. As a matter of fact, this can be easily explained: a formalist approach, consisting in trying to apprehend form with the usual artistic lexicon is here extremely complex, if not impossible. How can the protruding tension, almost tearing out the canvas, provoked by the metallic structure behind, be relevantly named "form" ? Which part of the usual art lexicon could serve as a reference to describe the halo of rust that corrodes the canvas, leading to its apparent destruction and at the same time organising it through the glittering lines at the surface that mingle with colours? Which words could be commissioned to describe the artist's monochromes when you realise they aren't stricto sensumonochromic, due to the many different layers of paint they are composed of ? How could we name what, though present in the work, can not be seen, ie is off-screen ? Which language tools could be used – thought, even – when strictly pictorial elements incorporate sculptural ones, when each and every one simultaneously encompass and compete against each other ? When the surface hosts grooves and cavities that reveal hidden layers, more amplified than nullified ? When the colours that inhabit and animate them refuse to be categorised by a single word – is this blue really blue ? When nothing can be said about what the work is supposed to mean, as the purpose is not to question meaning but essence, above all the essence of time and space? This may be, after all, considered the real subject, if not the substance of Mouffe's work. Eluding words, offering signifier without signified, captivating our glance to assert its own self-determination, it only proposes mindfully elaborated pictorial procedures as a narrative, relying on the requirements imposed by paint, canvas or underlying structure. The creations look like large tabernacles that captured time and let it ooze through their opaque surfaces, only to prove their total control. Nevertheless, if we think it over coldly, we may conclude that the paintings would only be part of a series of procedures operated on the medium itself. Precise, meticulous, ingenious, they intertwine, interpenetrate, confront metallic framework, produce translucent effects, perfect visual balance, partition surfaces possibly corroded by rust, which, incidentally, is here totally rehabilitated by the artist and its intrinsic beauty finally acknowledged after centuries of apprehension and contempt.
To speak the truth, Mouffe's work provides the spectator with a painting or a series of paintings which, while conversing with each other and the space they occupy, carry all the steps of their own genesis, the layers of their own emergence, the multiple and varied moments that speak their identity, the contingencies and tensions they had to overcome to finally exist and reach us. Surprisingly, being only, as one could say, an addition of tasks and procedures gathered on a surface and perfectly executed, how is it possible for them to have such grace and mortality, joy and gravity, immanence and permanence ? Moreover, they almost put the viewer in a state of sideration, absorbed, contemplating, almost drowning as if into a mirror. Answers come in the form of questions : would it be because, carrying their own genesis and origin, they tell about the nothingness they were born from? Or because the rust that slowly consumes some of the paintings whispers their fatal destiny, right before our eyes ? After all, the artist himself declares, as a profession of faith, that "the emptiness within must be confronted to start living again". According to him, nothingness is inside us, we are its vectors, its vehicles somehow. If he estimates, in the same sentence, that we are bound to "start living again", does it mean we are, at least partly, dead ? Indeed, the layers of paint, after the treatment imposed by the artist, ostensibly start a new life. As the artist leaves the canvas in some way unfinished, doesn't it, as a result, dutifully proceed on its journey through time ? It seems Michel Mouffe paints about the emptiness within us, his works murmur that we are matter but also void, which they mirror as would twin sisters. No despair, though, will be seeping from the canvases, no vision of death, as they celebrate the patient triumph of matter and the victory of colour. Besides, if one has to start living again, as in the artist's own words, won't it mean one defeated death one way or another, or at least a certain idea of death ? As temporary this victory could be, couldn't it be regarded as a promise of eternity ? Can't the tiny marble shards the artist sometimes spills on the canvas be seen as seeds of eternity ? Not the kind of eternity a god or divinity would bargain. Mouffe's creation are formidably devoid of the divine as much as they're filled with profane purity, and restore to matter, which we are also made of, its intrinsic ability to triumph over time, would it imply transformation and regeneration. Such work, as hermetic as sensually gorgeous, possibly proposes a mystique of nothingness, not in the sense of non-existence but as the condition to the emergence of matter, its primal origin, its feeding matrix, its home port. Nothingness as our life's intimate origin and ultimate sanctuary, rehabilitated as provider of eternity, for it is the cradle in which matter was born. In that respect – and there are certainly others – Mouffe's work is only that and all that : an oxymoron, as aforementioned, maybe the perfect, ultimate, absolute one which unites nothingness and eternity, tells about our shares of one and the other. It silently whispers, between those apparently irreconciliable tensions, the incredible, absolutely unthinkable event : we exist.