Feel like enjoying a night at the museum, a space travel or a discovery of Masters of engravings ? Vannes museums open their door...
Charles Belle. This gentle, silent path
4 July to 18 October 2009
For Charles Belle, a day spent away from the studio is a day lost. For him, painting is a matter of urgency, a compelling need to grasp life through simple subjects – a flower, a tree, an onion, and, more recently, a bull. These subjects are disturbing in the way they are disconnected from the great sweep of contemporary art: too figurative, too ambiguous and too appealing. Just as in the days after he left Besançon College of Fine Art in the 1980s, the artist continues to make a determined stand against prevailing trends, yesterday preoccupied with abstraction, today with dark imagery that refers to the violence of the world.
For eight years, Charles Belle devoted himself entirely to drawing. Once paint made an appearance, the forcefulness of his line drawing remained, underlying and invisible, but absolutely essential to the architecture of the whole. Through drawing, the artist appropriates form, internalises it and only then can he prevent the motif being lost and can liberally add colour to what are often gigantic canvasses.
There is no secret of the artist’s studio here, no place for defensively concealed gesture or lingering hesitation. Or is there? On the contrary, via the lens of an intelligent camera invited on occasion into the studio, questioning arises in our minds, just like the artist wrestling with the subject, in rarely revealed moments of exceptional intensity. Traced by the scratching seam of graphite running through the stick of hazel, the lines are immediately covered with colour, applied in successive layers and creating areas of transparency, rhythms and dizzying contrasts. The emergence of the work is directly experienced, the painting genuinely revealed. Like the painter, we emerge exhausted. Is he not going too far, ruining everything with that unbelievable green? A painter of opened, withered flowers, burst fruits and bulbs buried in dark depths, Charles Belle is an artist not of still life but of silent life, nature as a metaphor for life and death and for a never-ending resurgence.
The same subjects run through his œuvre again and again. Trees that appeared in 1985 reappear in 1991 with La douleur (The Pain), in the pitiful tree crippled by frost. In 2008, a fresh series of seven large-scale canvasses appeared, including Soumise (Subjugated), measuring almost two metres by four metres. The venture seems overblown, but the enormity of the work is forgotten and what remains is a total pictural experience. Maybe it is the fact that he has drawn each of the leaves of these trees, stripped bare, that gives them that density, as if they retained a forgotten memory of them. Where do these black 100 feuilles (100 Leaves) come from, drawn in bold pencil, like ghosts rising from the depths of Indian ink? Again we see leaves: this time each of the 1 473 leaves of the fig tree growing at the entrance to the studio, drawn by the artist until the gesture is depleted and the verge of madness reached; one tree leaf for one sheet of paper, each piled up and each rescued.
The exhibition of Charles Belle’s work, more than any other, is created in harmony with the space in which it is housed and by an artist particularly attentive to the public. As with previous locations, the artist has produced two monumental works for La Cohue, so that everything may be just right. A careful choice of words matters too. Dreamed rather than drawn, the poetry of Charles Belle goes beyond the boundaries of the written.