Culture
In order to speak about Fortuny, the Vaud painter has to go back to the early days of his career when, to use his own words, he «painted chairs». According to his exhibition curator and good friend Nicolas Raboud, Olivier Saudan is an abstract representational artist. «I paint what I see,» the painter explains. «The images aren’t in my head, they are quite real.» The fact that he can paint everything means that he isn’t limited. Since the late 1970s, this French-speaking Swiss artist has been one of the most prolific of his generation. His subjects appear to be excuses to paint. Excuse or not, by becoming pictures, his objects (particularly chairs) leave behind their ordinary identity to enable the vital act and essential reflex that is painting. One day, he discovered a revolving stand of postcards at a second-hand market. They featured photos of landscapes. He painted them all, from the Port of Oran and Ekmul to a Neopolitan panorama, without ever having set foot in any of these places. «People used to think that I was well travelled, but in reality I’m not capable of travelling by myself. I can’t even buy a plane ticket on my own!» Olivier Saudan is plagued
The Journey to Fortuny An artist’s career is an odyssey punctuated with wars, battles, and victories too. The road is not always smooth, but it does feature wonderful stopping points which leave their mark. Olivier Saudan’s painting is like one of those initiatory quests: a journey with stopping points along the way, where the destination is oneself. Text Leila Klouche / Photos Vanina Moreillon with anxiety, but he never lacks courage when it comes to his painting. Putting himself in risky situations spurs him on constantly to push the boundaries of creativity, and if he has to leave the studio and his friends and family behind in the process, then so be it! It was a project he submitted in 2007 for the consideration of the judging panel of the FEMS Prize, awarded by the Edouard & Maurice Sandoz Foundation, on the theme of «Nature», which was to give him the opportunity to put himself to the test. He set himself the challenge of undertaking six journeys in order to confront reality. When he won the prestigious prize, he didn’t know whether it was the best or worst thing that had ever happened to him. He was terrified about the whole thing. At the end of the day, he wouldn’t be going by himself, but he would be going for real this time. Japan, followed by Iceland, Scotland, New York, Morocco and, finally, Sainte-Victoire’s Mountain in Pays d’Aix were to be his destinations in this radical personal feat and strong artistic project. «Those journeys changed my life,» he admits, «and today they have become a necessity.» In 2011, during a stay in Venice for the Biennial, a friend recommended a museum to him: Palazzo Fortuny. This building houses the fascinating collection of Mariano Fortuny, an early 20th Century artist, humanist, craftsman and merchant. Tra, the Edge of Becoming, the exhibition which Olivier Saudan saw there, was a marvel of intelligence. It offered exactly what he expected from a museum, namely an open vision of the world. Objects and works from different periods and genres sat comfortably side by side. He was captivated by this universal museography and by the tool provided to visitors to guide them around the exhibition: a booklet featuring views of the museum’s 25 walls in silhouette form. «I was so struck by the clarity,» he remembers, «that when I left with the guide in my pocket, I knew exactly what my mission was: to paint Fortuny.» As soon as he returned from Venice, Olivier Saudan fervently set about painting these «interior landscapes» on 25 vast canvas sheets measuring 3 x 5 metres. «The canvas sheet pays homage to Mariano Fortuny’s fabrics, and the size comes from the fact that, for the first time in my life, I had a sense of the
©G.Saudan
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athed in light, the artist’s spacious studio is a study in picturesque chaos. Traces of paint, brushes soaking, images pinned to the walls and tools all over the place are evidence of sustained artistic activity. There are the canvas sheets. The 25 rolls are in a pile on the floor. Even rolled up they are beautiful. Their bold colours made up of stripes, their thick texture recalling boat sails, and their imposing size inspire curiosity. Ready and waiting to be shown, these are the 25 paintings of Palazzo Fortuny, the latest stopping point in the work of Olivier Saudan.
A view of Palazzo Fortuny in the Saint-François church in Lausanne.
scale of what I was doing.» This feeling that it was a key moment in his career remained with him, and gave him the desire to display his work by staging an exhibition which would showcase it. Unfortunately, finding a venue capable of displaying canvasses of that length (125 metres!) was something of a frustrating feat for the painter. However, art always prevails over earthly constraints. Exactly two years after the revelation in Venice, the Palazzo Fortuny exhibition went on display in the nave of the Church of Saint-François in Lausanne, thanks to Pully Art Museum, in a version tailored for this picture railfree space, giving life to Fortuny but without robbing it of its grandeur. Eight paintings were suspended above visitors, forcing them to tilt their heads back, like banners declaring their act of faith. Due to the power of Fortuny, and the FEMS project before it, a barrier has come down. The encounter with the real landscape, followed by the revelation of the «interior landscapes» have given the painter a new freedom to travel, but also to go back to painting «his chairs» coherently. Incidentally, a 26th canvas sheet hangs in his studio. It depicts a scene of the wall supporting it and the chair on which the painter is sitting. Goodbye Fortuny! www.olivier-saudan.ch
REGARDS AUTOMNE - HIVER 2013 / 2014
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