Text that accompanied the paintings exhibited during the 3rd Salon de Noël 2010, at St Antonin Noble Val (Tarn & Garonne, France)
To me personally, the question whether my work can be considered art is irrelevant. My inclination, lately, to produce series of paintings, based on photo material collected with the help of models, brought me to the idea that what I try is better described as a form of reporting, of documentary making or even strip book production, using oil paint & canvas. Each painting is like a ‘still’ of an indeed very slow film, a reflection on the microcosm of the individual human being, and eventually, a search for the soul of things. I have always been fascinated by the ‘unpronounceable’ in human expression, in the context of the individual as well as well as related to someone else. In communication between man there are 3 more or less well-defined layers of oral exchange. The first is all that encompasses daily communication, about the weather when we wake up, to the question what we will eat at dinner time, and anything in between that helps us in maintaining our routines of living (together). The second layer contains information that is a lot more difficult to express, to exchange. It runs from the mourning you feel continuously because of the death of a best friend, to changes in your body functioning, that irreversibly seem to emphasise ageing. If really need be you can talk about these things, but always in an incomplete manner. Then, finally, there is that layer of the truly unpronounceable; you know something is brewing somewhere, let’s say in your soul, to give it a geographical place in your body, but you can’t define what it is that is eating you. The unpronounceable….. Four series of paintings are presented, mutually related in an effort to grasp the unpronounceable. In the first (the one I personally love most), “The Sweetness of Madame Bovary”, I try to catch what Flaubert couldn’t describe in writing, relatively speaking because of the times he lived in, but also in an absolute sense because he ran into the same fundamental, unpronounceability of matters. Madame Bovary may have just looked like this when she tried to live her humanity. The second series, “Consciousness & Death” refers to the vestibule of death I found myself in twice, as a result of a before unknown hyper-allergy. While death is mostly connected with violence, with humanity shrivelling up (Alzheimer), with loss of beauty, my personal experience here is of sweetness in transition. Can we eventually organise death this way, just to beat its ugliness, to beat fear and hopelessness……..? The third series, “Sophie & Phoebe”, concerns the preliminary sketch and study work I have done so far in connection to a commissioned portrait. The last series, “Landscapes”, is the most abstract, the most detached one. I do not know myself yet what I describe here. It’s like walking a landscape and not knowing how the next valley looks like. That’s OK with me, I hope with you too……..
25 of November, 2010
Arnoud Budelman