2006 0613 en interview kamikaze [m fi 1922]

CONVERSATION

What counts is kamikaze

I believe it’s only despair that makes us act, or rather react against our condition as human beings who are, against our will, immersed in a life that is no more than a ‘waiting room’... No need, nor appeal, nor aim... As despair is nothing more than pride in disguise and vice versa, it is mainly out of pride that that we are seeking an ‘emergency exit’, well aware that nobody is getting out of here alive. Which is, in fact, something that I myself approve of.

It is not the painter who chooses the canvas, rather it is the canvas that chooses the painter. One is never sure what is going to happen. As far as I am concerned, there comes a time when I find myself before a kind of apparition. The canvas appears, but I don’t know it. I don’t recognize it. It’s hard for me to take in. So, I have to exercise patience, and acknowledge that I may be entirely mistaken, and that it may well be acceptable after all. I believe that each painter who wants to push his limits to the extreme, if not exceed them, first and foremost needs to wait. The painting gesture itself counts for little in these mechanisms. It is simply the concretisation, through matter, of something that belongs to the sphere of the spirit and that must be translated into light; an activity work that principally attempts to unveil the invisible, but dazzling presence hidden behind matter. ‘Art is a wound turned into light’, as Braque said. The image that I create is an attempt to come and fill the lack inherent in life.

It’s the hand that works The painting gesture is the conclusion of a process... It is like an incontrovertible final stop in the whole structure of thoughts and emotions that inhabit the artist. Furthermore, the moment when I stop the canvas is the most important, because it is definitive.

Painting is a complex and disintegrating activity, as it goes against the grain of the rules of everyday life. One can talk about the pleasure of painting, but this pleasure only exists when the painting works properly. But it works only every now and then! And often one is not even aware of it working. Thus the painter gets licked at each attempt.

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He paints from failure to failure, from hope to hope. Naturally, in the act of painting, which sometimes verges on delirium, there is a certain ‘pleasure’. Every canvas that has ‘come off ‘, however tragical, desperate, dangerous it may be, has been painted with a feeling that borders on relief. With each new canvas the painter nurtures his hope of succeeding where he has failed before. The painter’s main work consists in waiting.

One is entirely occupied by what one does, by what one sees, by what one is going through...

Actually, I don’t know what I want. I only know what I no longer want.

To know what one doesn’t want may thus be more important than to have an aim.

Absolutely, because to have an aim, a system, is to fall into banality, into ennui. It reeks of death already.

There is the panic of painting, of having to paint. But there is worse: the panic of no longer being able to paint, and above all, of being aware of this inability. I am convinced that a painter may one day realize that he is painting his last canvas, that he is not going any further. Then he must have the courage to force himself to lay down his brush.

Death sets in when there’s repetition.

Death begins with repetition that brings nothing new, that is no longer invitation to any adventure.

Perhaps, as Lacan said, there is a lack in repetition.

I like Lacan. I find that his reflections pertaining to desire and lack translate well into painting... I believe that an artist acts rather because of lack than because of well-being.

It is lack that provokes separation and therefore desire. The canvas is that blank space in which the painter (and it takes courage to admit we are in pieces !) can sublimate the lack by recreating a semblance of unity. Art is the result of the misfortune, the anxiety and the fear of the void that haunt imperfect man. He attempts to reconcile this with his

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search for the absolute. This reconciliation, which is admittedly temporary, may pass through some form of absence.

You are putting forward the terms of the problem of creation in whatever field.

For me it’s the only attitude possible. And it’s an attitude that consists in avoiding untruth rather than in finding truth.

A skilled hack, for instance, may produce a good novel. Georges Bataille said that as few as five novels had made their mark on him. He couldn’t see how Balzac would have been able to survive as Balazc if he had not written Sarrazine, Dostoyevsky if he had not written Notes from the Underground... The titles he goes on to mention are perhaps not the most representative nor the best by their authors, but they released such an irrepressible power in them that the authors would not have been able to go on living if they had not spewed them out in some way or other.

I am certain that the fact of wanting to accomplish a canvas expresses the will to go on living. The artist finds no rest as long as the canvas has not arrived. The soul is in the patience. The painter alternates between waiting and creating. Until the moment when the pressing need to create submerges him. However, it remains a very mysterious mechanism that is hard to direct.

So you mean that the working time of the painter is not predetermined. It stops when the artist has the feeling the canvas is finished. Until he has that feeling, he remains dogged by this preoccupation in everything he does. He’s unable to live.

Painting is not work. It is an attitude through which our own manifestations express themselves. This attitude requires work and vice versa. It’s a product of obsession, of neurosis. It’s not a gift. Sometimes it’s a state of grace. But quite a few battles have been lost in a state of grace...

One should go back to the original sense of the concept of ‘work’, in the noble sense of the term. The Greek term ‘poeisis’ refers to ‘making’, and to make something is an act.

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Yes, but the painting act is, to my mind, very complicated, if not incomprehensible. It doesn’t embrace any system. To me, to obtain perfection is inhuman. As a matter of fact, I love imperfection. A canvas cannot be foreseen. The result that marks the ‘travail à l’oeuvre’ (the work on the work) is never the one that was expected.

In the same way one constructs oneself on one’s own traumatisms.

Actually, one is above all constituted by the battles one has been waging. And, in an awful lot of them one ends up a loser. That is not a grave matter. Failure is often the foundation of genius. It’s what I call the triumph of the accident. Failing to bring it off is not anything negative, on the contrary, it is what makes us start again. One must paint in spite of, rather than because of.

It’s a bit like being in a tunnel. We can’t see the light and we think we’lll never see it again. Then a ray of light appears. We have come through a crisis. The only thing we learn from this experience is that we are in the light for the time being only. Evidently, we are better armed and more experienced when entering another tunnel, but it’s still a tunnel.

Yes, but the point is each time for us to call this knowledge into danger, to translate it into intuition, into instinct, in order to avoid being paralysed by it. And that’s precisely what the kamikaze individual does.

Even when we’re being better armed ourselves, the next tunnel is often more difficult than the previous. It needs to be equal to our strength, to our responses and our capacities If one regards the ‘travail’ of the painter as an ordinary craft or compares it with the work of some specialist (whether a cardiologist or a mechanic...), one might assume that the acquisition of a certain skill and a command of the gesture obviously simplifies things. But that is not how it works. The certainties, as far as they exist, are only temporary and skill may be rubbish. The situation becomes more difficult as one increasingly rations not only the demands of the work but also the time investment it requires. And then one notices how life is getting shorter. And the painting does not 4

wait for the painter. It decides him and will abandon him if it judges him too weak.

That’s a serious matter.

Can you see how life’s getting shorter ?

It’s not something that scares me, but it’s a fact. And the observation sometimes relieves me. Paradoxically, painting ignores time. The life of a man, the life of a painter does not count. It is but the price to pay for the existence of the work. And one has to pull it off even so. Filling the waiting time is not nothing ...

In objective terms time is runing out, that much is evidently. But, you know as well as I do, that when you are facing your canvas, things start to lose a sort of objectivity. You become, as it were, possessed by your own creation, and you find yourself outside time.

There is time outside painting and time inside painting. If there is any ‘happiness’ to be found in painting, I believe it is the latter. For in this time one can detach oneself from the triviality of everyday life, by entering the work and its struggle. To create is to lock up time in a canvas. Thus the canvases are only exercises in accepting time, in managing time in view of death. Painting brings to bear my birth and my death.

For instance, if I write some poetry and I am asked to describe the state I’m in whilst writing it, my reply is simple: the man who is talking to you is not the man who has written the poetry. At the moment of writing there’s a sort of civility, of social intelligence that disappears. One enters into a state of possession, all senses alert. As I see it, what you’re referring to is the primary constituent of the creative act.

I would use the word ‘availability’. It is a moment of being available to the canvas or the poem. It is the Visitation. One needs to be there, waiting with all the tension, the dispuiet, the solitude that waiting implies. Besides, doesn’t solitude consist, precisely, in fabricating waiting ? And the upshot lies at the cross-roads of idea and emotion, where it from a necessity.

Visitation is quite close to possession.

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I believe that possession comes afterwards. That’s why availability is an absolute requisite not only for the creator but also for the viewer. The canvas exists only when it is being looked at. This is one of the problems facing the artist: the ‘ménage à trois’. For the magic of the painting to product its effect, the existence of a third party is required so as to deliver the artist from it. The painter nurtures the hope that his canvas will provoke a change of perception in the life of the viewer. The aim of this obsession with communciation is, in one way or another, to avert solitude. The canvas thus is always a sort of account through with the painter seeks to justify himself.

There is you, there is the canvas and the canvas has ‘come off’ when it speaks to a pair of eyes. I can appreciate the relationship that arises between a painting and myself, a painting that imposes itself on me, that I impregnate myself with, that I keep in my memory. Over the past three decade there’s been a growing trend of putting on massive exhibition, and I find this infuriating. When I went to see the Caravaggio exhibition in London recently, there were only fifteen paintings and that was amply sufficient.

A recent medical study has estimated that the human capacity to perceive forms, colours and light is limited to 80 to 85 canvases. For me, the figure is even lower. And it may sound provocative or outrageous, but it is hard for me to look at any canvas other than in a private setting.

At my home, there are no canvases. The continuous confrontation would be too annoying for me. In this sense the homes of some collectors are really fearsome. The sheer amount of their canvases tires me out. I have the impression that after all one no longer sees them, one gets accustomed to their presence and there is no more surprise.

Similarly, it’s impossible to really listen to Mozart’s Requiem as background music.

When I want to see a work, I go to the studio or the museum (in spite of my ambivalent relationship with these institutions). I become a viewer myself. You tell me that you went to see the Mystic Lamb in Ghent. A canvas should be paid a visit. That’s what musea are for : to let us encounter the canvases we need.

As a child I went to Amsterdam to see Rembrandt. My great love for Rembrandt has never left me. As a young boy I entered into a dialogue with this great painter who had already lived a full life and grown old. Ten years later, I went back to see the same paintings and the dialogue had changed. Now, when I’m not so young any more, I still go and see Rembrandt’s paintings and it brings me ever closer to him and to the essence 6

in myself. The dialogue has been developing until today and now the lesson of the master extends beyond painting itself. It’s absolutely marvellous.

Particularly when one can see a canvas a number of times over a 30 or 40 year period.

And still love it after 40 years.

One day, in the Louvre, I happened - these things never happen by chance – to see a self-portrait by Rembrandt when I went to see Ingres. The unexpected confrontation gave me a shock. I have found that, in these great institutions, the canvases call you, solicit you during your walk, not unlike streetwalkers do. Creating the need on the spot....

I felt the same in the National Gallery, when I got to see the Arnolfini Portrait. I had not planned anything and my walk took me to this painting quite spontaneously.

Something like that happened to me in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, when I entered a room with superb paintings by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto.... Amazingly, there was a small light flashing on the wall, like a piece of broken glass.

Italian painting is very warm, very voluptuous, very colourful, with dominant brown and red, rather than the black of Spanish painting, which is much more nervous, more « wounded » and, in this sense, closer to our Flemish painting...

Well, as it happened, that little canvas, that little light that lit up the whole room, was a small portrait by Memling.

We don’t exist outside some aesthetic and historical environment. We never come from nowhere. We have all been influenced. Creation is always the consequence of all that has influenced and formed us.

Yes, but the artist seeks to escape from this baggage, which over time,may become an impediment. Only then will he be able to develop a personal oeuvre. The viewer may, at most, hope that it contains a formulation of a questioning. But there is no answer.

Sometimes, when looking at the self-portraits by Rembrandt in his closing years, I say to myself that only a bloody fool could keep from crying. What I see is entirely right.

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And that is what relieves me, helps me to live. I believe that art is one of the means that help us to live. It enthralls us, amazes us, comforts us temporarily.

For you, it’s even more than that. It’s your life.

Indeed. I’ve never found any relief anywhere else. My parents were vehemently opposed to my becoming a painter. Yet, my discovery of painting through the canvas by Hieronymus Bosch : Christ carrying the Cross, in Ghent – when I was about twelve years old -, gave me the opportunity to extract myself from the family cage in which I was suffocating. It was a relief, an enlightenment.

It was a first choice, very clear and very simple : I wanted to paint and nothing else. In this sense painting appeared to be absolutely necessary for me. It allowed me to exile myself from the enclosure of everyday life.

The painter and the artist are terribly doubt-filled. They walk on a tight rope : there is lack on the one side and desire on the other. They are torn between these two poles. I don’t believe that one could do a painting on a subject that is not either lack or desire.

This even goes for paintings that are apparently more ‘joyful’. Those by Renoir, for instance. He did not paint these opulent ladies out of pleasure as one might suppose, but out of desire. Renoir even said : ‘I paint with my prick’. That does mean something. He did not paint to show the beauty and the charm of female nudity... He painted out of desire. And desire is lack already.

Art is born from a deficiency, from a lack in our ‘being’. I don’t believe in ‘painting beauty’. It’s not interesting. Besides, what is considered beautiful is often conform to the norm, and the norm kills by a surfeit of homogenization. It doesn’t permit exceeding certain limits of the possible ; the possible, then, becomes horrifying.

Beauty, in the sense of norm, is not what we are interested in.

The artist is, above all, a human being. There can be no definite attitude before the canvas. I myself never know very well what is going to happen. It’s a perpetual ‘travail à l’oeuvre’, always with an unexpected result. When one has a feeling of repeating oneself (but it is the painting that leaves the painter, not the other way round), one should be able to let go. Capitulation is an intelligent, courageous and difficult act.

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I’ve seen admirable painters start repeating themselves without renewing themselves.

Francis Bacon, who painted canvases of a terrifying beauty (the popes, the Van Gogh studies), is a striking example, I believe. Little by little he began to make paintings that were, while no less tormented, still cleaner, more polished... he fell into the trap. Instead of continuing to dig deep, to give way to the void, to discover his own fragility, he programmed himself, he started to foresee.

Do you think there many painters who evade this trap ?

If there’s anything that scares me, that is it. But can we really know the moment our creative drive leaves us ? Perhaps, at such a moment, the original pride that drove us to the work originally turns into a stupid and malicious pride, a lying pride. Now, is there any lie worse than a lie to ourselves ?

If you have an exhibition, it means that something leaves your studio and, therefore, comes out of yourself, like a page being turned. The time that is required for the maturation of any creation is seldom allowed by an artistic system that drives to repetition...

To return to the example of Bacon, when he started to paint the suicide of his friend, George Dyer, he knew in advance what he was going to paint. That’s the difference.

That kind of painting makes me sad because the magic is no longer there. The certainties that drive the painter to create should be mutating perpetually, adapting to the evolving needs of the canvas. If not, painting slides into printing.

I believe that mystery should emanate from the canvas to some degree, that the canvas should remain partly impenetrable. Like literature. There are books that really move you, whose reading changes you forever.

That is, as far as I’m concerned, the aim of all creation. There’s no need to read many books. Reading just one book may provoke something in us. Similarly, one painting may change us.

We must remain on the move. Man is a nomad. The settled way we live now is not normal. When one is not a nomad, at least in one’s head, one is doomed.

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It’s the story of Abel and Cain. The latter settled down while the former continued to move. As Cain could not stand Abel’s mobility, he eliminated him. It’s the revenge of matter on spirit. Today the Cains are the majority: that’s our problem.

Painting that no longer elicits displacement is nothing more than matter. When the painter no longer manages to translate matter into spirit, into light, he is finished.

Naturally, painting is exorcism of an innate panic, but it needs to function in order to be so. At a certain moment something disappears. Is it because of shock, of fatigue, or simply because of having the impression of having said all, painted all ? Van Gogh’s canvases carry a ‘grave‘ light. The damned aspect of his personality renders the splendour of his painting dazzling. His Sunflowers possess an excruciating beauty. One day Van Gogh got burned : painting abandoned him. He knew that he wasn’t going any further. In some cases the painter dies and the man continues to live, willing or unwilling. As for Van Gogh, he died of it, at the age of 37. We don’t know what would have become of him, and far less, of his painting.

Speaking cynically I’d say that is a blessing.

Yes, Rimbaud stopped as well.

But Rimbaud didn’t die. He just stopped writing. That’s a different story altogether.

Certainly, he stopped writing. He chose a different life, which was, in its way, a ‘mise à l’oeuvre’ of his views on poetry. He kept on wandering, as a poet, without adding anything to his oeuvre. But he never lied.

Unfortunately, for a wok to be recognized, it needs to be brought on the market. That’s how things go. So there comes a moment when art is taken over and limited by the system to activate direct and indirect financial flows.

The art business in its present-day form didn’t exist when I started in the sixties. It was as a consequence of the first big oil crisis in the seventies that the commerce of art started to grow to unparalleled proportions. But the universe of the studio must be distinguished from that of the ‘art scene’. They are two opposed worlds, independent from each other.

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The public educates and conditions itself to love certain things.

It must be admitted that looking at a canvas is far from simple. Many people judge. But a canvas is not to be judged. At a pinch one passes judgement on oneself. In the museum I can see people look, judge and then go away. That’s not how it should be....

One should abandon oneself to some degree, have some courage and confidence in the power of one’s own fragility that becomes exposed as one discovers a work of art.

When I went to see the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent some years a ago, I was gripped by a powerful emotion straightaway. I would have liked to have the privilege to be alone before this work, if only for one hour. With painting we can have a special relationship that completely cuts off from reality.

Anyway, one finds that only a small proportion of the public is there for personal pursuits. One should feel the need for the painting, so that there is an urgency and a necessity to consult it. One mustn’t go and see paintings for entertainment. It’s all much more profound... . Pleasure does not lie in entertainment...

It’s possible to have a special encounter with a canvas. There is a Masaccio in the church of a small Tuscany village called Regello. I always make a detour to see it. I can get close to it, step back, do anything I want. On arrival, I switch on the light to the left, and when the painting is lit, a different story begins.

Furthermore, I have recently found that, according to the events in my life, my moods, my days, I always discover something I haven’t seen before in the canvases that surround me every day.

That is because you change. The canvas, however, does not.

Of course.

There are dialogues that last only a day. These are the saddest.

But there are works that don’t deserve more.

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That’s one more obsession for the painter. Will the work last ? Will a painting continue to be generous ?

In the catalogues of some Eugène Leroy exhibitions we find interviews that are not unlike what we are talking about : that certainties are shifting. Although they arise from a fundamental core, it would be pretty cowardly not to accept the fact that certainties evolve with time and, even more, that it is the canvases that impose temporary certainties on the painter.

I believe that every individual who wages battle with the angel, or the demon, of creation arrives at the same conclusions. If there are any conclusions to be drawn at all.

I quite like the phrase ‘I’m not quite certain’. It is rather violent... I believe that the creative act is a very intimate one that we perform alone, quite alone. At that moment, we are faced with the fundamental solitude that is part of the human condition. It’s an activity in which nobody can help us. What’s more, nobody demands it from us. In fact, we paint the canvas that we lack.

In any case, it is an act that we don’t choose but that imposes itself on us.

In that act there is a pain that we must accept, an urgency. There is the panic of failing before the actual painting starts, the urgency of passing through it, because, if we don’t pass through it, we end up badly, I believe. We go on dragging its corpse along with us.

But let’s not forget that every real canvas, however cruel and tragical it may be, has been painted with ‘pleasure’, even when the act of painting implies pain.

We can also end up in a bad way while actually painting [Laughter] Even when we don’t end up badly, we may still go through crises. It’s not for nothing that some great creative individuals, tormented beings racked with pain, resort to all kinds of excesses : alcohol, drugs …

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It helps to get through slack moments. I believe that taking drugs, searching for a kind of absence, is to some extent what saves us from the banality of everyday life. Because that’s what it is, I mean, to me... But it has never helped me to make a work. Moreover, the work doesn’t always succeed in overcoming ennui. The risk, for the painter, is to be invaded by ennui while at full creative momentum.

Still, I know the use of drugs and alcohol. I’ve spent some time in clinics....

As a consequence of drugs.

Rather as a result of a combination of drugs, a virtually constant depressive state, as well as the fact of no longer being able to paint. For a painter cannot work perpetually.

He is continually preoccupied, but he cannot spew out paintings and drawings relentlessly. He is bound to have some slack moments. I can see the therapeutic aspect of the ‘gesture’ of painting , but it does not suffice... Anyway, I have become aware that the work always comes into being in spite of, rather than because of the problems. It is false romanticism to believe that an artist who suffers is a ‘great’ artist.

I agree. Unhappiness is not ineluctable fate. However, the labour of overcoming it comes at a high price for us human beings. There are people, I believe, who take their strength from unhappines, but it is totally out of place to wallow in pseudo-creative suffering. Moreover, the problem of suffering cannot be solved : ‘Our need for consolation is insatiable’, says Stig Dagerman, and it corresponds with our perpetual struggle against things and the anguish of letting ourselves be devoured. The anguished great live with such a strong internal disorder that they are obliged to offsset it by having an organised life.

Although it neither suffices nor saves me, painting is the temporary solution for exorcizing this chaos. Even when I was a child, drawing proved to be an exorcizing therapeutic gesture for me. It has always been only anxiety that has forced me to move on.

Paradoxically, I have noticed that great melancholics often possess a capacity for living that is more intense than that found in other people.

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Van Gogh became a painter in spite of Van Gogh the sick man. Likewise, Kafka’s genius lay way beyond his personal problems.

The problem you’re referring to is one that has been growing steadily, especially over the last few years. Researchers who take it upon themselves to analyse a work are often strangers to the creative act in what occupies them.

I believe one becomes a researcher in much the same way as one joins the anti-riot squad : out of need for norms and security.

To me, they’re almost like vultures dissecting and feeding on the creation of others. In fact, their work always tends to confine the creative act within the limits of their own analysis.

Let me quote Hugo Claus : ‘Why should a lion worry about the fleas in his mane’ !

The vision of a creative person is, naturally much wider than that of any researcher.

The latter is unable to see this...

To deny the mysterious part that is beside oneself is something diminishing. Analysis immobilizes the canvas, while mystery nurtures it. Mystery maintains my thirst for the infinite, my need for hope.

Whereas analysis tends to annihilate these.

That’s right. Analysis reduces them to something that is inoffensive, that is no longer upsetting, that may even be putting us at ease.

This means that an explanation, a norm that homogenizes, excludes the uncontrollable and the unforeseen that are a blessing for the painter.

Indeed, a work is so vast that it cannot be explained : edging towards the saying does not mean that one is saying.

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In the Mystic Lamb one can perfectly well explain the singing angels, Adam and Eve...

And the central panel is a minutely detailed botanic inventory of the time. But in fact the Mystic Lamb so much more than that.

One could say something light about painting. But the lightness does not preclude the terrible that it always conveys. It goes beyond us. The work lies behind the canvas. The magic is not what one can see, but what is going on beyond the visible, beneath the skin.

The magic is visible if and only if you enter into the canvas. You may encounter canvases you don’t know but still recognize because they are sublime and because they have actually been lying deep within you for a long time. I believe that each human being who has the courage to think carries in him a part of the sublime that makes this encounter possible. As Lacan said : ‘God is in the details, but one has to stoop down to pick them up.’

For the hand to work, one needs to be occupied by mystery …

Indeed, but there is also the search for mystery and for what prompts mystery. This is often a risky undertaking. Still, a necessity emerges, a way in which, among all the risks, repetition can be made new.

Besides, mystery does not reside in art only. The unquiet eye can see mystery everywhere : in landscapes, wanderings, encounters... Love and divinity are also great mysteries. The image of the deity will always be shrouded in mystery.

I freely admit that I have given up trying to comprehend.

Comprehending is grasping, confining, limiting. It produces just a feeling of satisfaction. The possible becomes dreadful as soon as the painter leaves the creative sphere and topples over into the ‘comme if faut’. I believe that delirium is part of any creation. Above all one mustn’t seek to understand delirium. The task is to try to construct oneself, to invent a semblance of unity for oneself. The work is never done.

At the end of our life we realize that we understand only a small percentage of the whole. And what we manage to understand turns out to be so ridiculous with respect to the bulk that remains unexplained, namely, the sense of wonder that resides in us and

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that allows us to live and create, that it’s just not worth wasting time on it. It’s much better to develop a sensibility, to search for the mystery, the ineffable.

And also to learn to let things be, to avoid becoming attached to material or immaterial goods. One of the major difficulties of persons who are confronted with viewing a canvas, derives from their lack or excess of knowledge of art history (to which they cling to avoid foundering into the unknown). I’m of the opinion that art should be studied with what I’d call a certain nervousness. It doesn’t necessarily help to appreciate it, but one should have seen certain things before going to see others. I mean only in rare cases does somebody come to Guernica without first knowing Rubens, Goya, and above all, Cézanne.

I couldn’t agree with you more.

It won’t do to look at a canvas and say ‘it’s good’ or ‘it’s bad’. The judge is always the guardian of the norm as well. We must get rid of him.

A grasp of chronology is important. An artist starts or carries on from where a previous painter stopped or got stuck. So the artist has one task to fulfill : to find how to go beyond that point.

One often omits to place art in its social context. For instance, in a letter addressed to his patron, Filippo Lippi, describing the scene in a canvas that has to contain some character or other, concludes that the frame requires more gold than was planned and that therefore he needs extra money. I find this absolutely fascinating ! This letter on technical matters shows us how things were done.

The present-day situation of the artist has its origin in romanticism, when painters ceased to be carrying out commissions.

Goya was the first to escape from commissions, the first to dare painting human horror without disguise, somewhat like today’s investigative journalists. He modified the painter’s responsibility.

It is clear, hwoever, that most of the great names that have survived to the present-day are known only through commissioned work. Furthermore, it is striking to find that they 16

employed people to work for them. During the Romantic era the artist decided to do as he pleased. Subsequently, in the 20th century, anyone who told an artist to include this or that in his canvas, was considered a dictator, a financial dealer wanting to commission things that suited him. But the largest part of the history of painting consists of commissioned work.

All art from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance has much the same subjects or themes : crucifixions, madonnas, pietas... (that the catholic church was by far the most important maecenas, is an easy argument to make !)

To come back to the notion of mystery, it’s amazing that we don’t know what it is that makes Rubens’ Descent from the Cross in Antwerp cathedral rise to the level of a real painting, while a descent from the cross in a church round the corner, with the same subject, and the same composition, is not more than an image. It’s in this difference that mystery resides. I was raised with crucifixions, calvaries. As a child I saw some in the school chapel. Then I saw some in musea and I felt the immense difference.

The public is under the impression that contemporary art no longer shows much mastery (which is often confounded with skill). The impression is wrong.

The problem of painting has remained the same : to find an image that expresses its time. Bosch and Rubens were involved in a such a search.

At Picasso’s death a retrospective exhibition covering his last ten years was held in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. I was 20 years old at that time. When I saw these canvases dripping with paint, these people fucking and pissing... I was tremendously disappointed. At the time I was still very much concerned with baggage, Manet, Cézanne, Duchamp... I couldn’t accept what I was seeing there. It was terrrible. Five years later, I saw these canvases again in Amsterdam. And all of a sudden, I became aware of their genius. It had been necessary for me to let go of everything I had been taught, but without losing anything, on the contrary indeed. Having immersed myself in painting since I was twelve, I had needed time to appreciate this kind of painting. How could this man let go of all that and charge his work with genuinely marvellous atrocity ? He had emptied himself, and emptying produces space. The emptiness had increased his ability to wait for the painting. Painting could well be : translating time into space...

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You give me the example of Picasso in his closing years. That takes me back, again, to the fifteen last canvases by Caravaggio in the London exhibition. I was most impressed to see that at the end of his lif, he still had the same power and was at the pinnacle of his mastery. The painter is occupied by a life force (and by the fear of being abandoned by it) that allows him to transform matter into energy. Similarly, I talked to a more contemporary painter, who was a member of the Cobra group : Constant. Having grown very old, his fear was having trembling hands. He said : ‘I make blots. It doesn’t tremble, I can go on.’

He must have been quite old.

Alechinsky was a member of Cobra too, but he was very young when he joined the group.

Alechinsky is a painter of the centre. I’m rather fascinated by the margins myself.

That’s where I grew up, where I have positioned myself. That’s were I have my encounters. You know, what really matters is the kamikaze.

Alechinsky quotes Bram Van Velde profusely. The latter was not a very talkative man, but when he did speak out, he often hit the nail on the head: ‘When a painting is being looked at, it is always alone’.

I believe that one should restrict oneself to what is urgent, to what is necessary. Presentday overproduction is sickening (and to think that there are practically no more commissions... !). I don’t want to kick the bucket and leave a heap of useless canvases behind. A grave responsibility lies with the painter. If he bears this in mind, he should, I believe, clean up as much as possible before departing this life. Destruction is part of creation (the kamikaze again...). Certain canvases escape. Those that remain are not necessarily the best.

Bram Van Velde said that genuine painting approached ugliness, turmoil . And indeed : all great painting has something terrible. Even Monet’s cathedrals. Not terrible in any negative sense, but in the sense of something that cannot be tamed, that cannot be detained. Something that lifts us up, like a whirlwind. In a way, that’s what art does: it lifts us up because we are in fact stuck in the mud. And I believe that art is like an angel that pulls us a bit out of the mud (and then lets go of us again).

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In a way, the act of painting purifies us.

The act as well as the gaze.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I feel as if I’m purifying myself in the Visitation.

Let’s consider, in this regard, the function of the famous Issenheim Retable in Colmar !

(Footnote : This retable was commissioned by a monastic order caring for people with skin disorders. Grünewald’s Christ was pockmarked with wounds that reflected all skin diseases. For the skin patients contemplation of this image was a kind of therapy).

But that is from the viewer’s angle. For the painter, I think, art must also have this function.

Yes, but I don’t quite know what purity actually is. I believe it doesn’t exist. And trying to impose it might become dangerous (just think of the Ubermensch theory). Reality, I mean impurity, is much more fascinating anyway.

Purification and purity are two different things. You said, metaphorically, that we’re stuck in the mud and that art makes it possible for us to get out of it. It’s in this sense that I think art is purifying.

I don’t know. It’s not because one rises up that one purifies oneself.... I like impure people, the niggers, the dogs of painting.

Purification is a religious term. And art is related to religion and the divine.

I believe that all things that transcend us, also take us closer to the divine and therefore, the rituals of a religion. Art is among these.

The most engaging works are often supplications of man to God, supplications that (who knows) Gods turns his back on with a yawn...

Fundamentally, that’s what I think.

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Art is an endeavour to bridge the immense gap between man, with his paltry achievements, and divine perfection. Even a nonbeliever may very well have an intuitive knowledge of and a sensitivity to divinity or the divine.

For me, these values mean more than that. My relationship with the divine is not set in any code or practice. It’s situated elsewhere. It belongs to the same register as the dialogue you have with Rembrandt. And, as a matter of course, in this regard we also live in the fear of God. The absence of God is what has always struck me most fiercely. Moreover, it’s what has turned the artist away from God since the Renaissance, when he replaced the divine motif with a human one. But the divine or mysical state still exists.

I’d put it more modestly and say that when one is working or producing something, one is moved by a state of grace.

A state of grace. There’s a very good phrase indeed. That’s what it really is. But the road to reach it is quite cruddy....

One must suffer !

I don’t know. Consciousness of suffering is something that can be acquired. Somebody who doesn’t know any other condition may find it quite normal to be suffering. The artist has no choice. He is bound to his condition. On the other hand, there is doubt. And doubt is painful. It’s what spawns hope...

Doubt never disappears. We are at the same time occupied by a very strong certainty and permanently riddled with doubt. I believe that it is these paradoxes that are the engines of action. Being sure of what one is doing carries the risk of achieving a bland result. But, on the other hand, any advance in creation, in thought comes from the violent opposition of these forces within the artist. It’s almost a caricature. It’s always as a result of this internal tugging that something comes up.

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I have a kamikaze side. I have a perverse relationship with self-destruction and even with destruction in general.

I mentioned before that different characters are alive in me when I’m painting. A multitude of painters in me want to make their canvas : the chaotic painter, the methodical, the delirious, the rational, the paranoid, the idiot... To make these painters concur or to make them agree on a canvas, is a peculiar job. It takes a lot of energy. As we’ve said, we are all torn between our reason and our nervous system. I think that one must not try to take up a position at the extremes of these two poles. I don’t believe in painting or art that is purely spiritual or purely affective ; purely.... (here’s that word again !)

Do you mean visceral as opposed to spiritual ?

I loathe the phrase ‘He’s a real painter’. ‘Visceral’ painter is too much belly and guts. It disgusts me. I believe that each painter should seek a very delicate balance between head and nerves. Each artist derives his singularity from a particular mixture of these two.

Magritte tended towards the rational, with a marvellous sense of humour. Cézanne travelled a long way before he reached the Sainte Victoire mountain. He had to leave behind quite a lot of ‘guts’ and get closer to the ‘head’ so that eventually he could paint these marvellous and terrible bathers.

One can call upon reason or the nervous system, but above all, it is intelligence that lends structure to the nervous chaos.

In the Renaissance artists were not only excellent crafstmen in painting, but also in architecture, astrology... There were capable of performing an immensely wide range of disciplines. Then, it all started to blur. Still, Matisse, who’s much more contemporary, can be said to have possesssed intensive know-how. He was a very good craftsman as well.

I don’t think things became blurred. It’s just that creative individuals started to specialize. But every artist is a craftsman to some degree. One cannot make any discoveries without having gathered a certain amount of experience, without having learned to cope with the material.

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In spite of his solitude, the artist is always the outcome of history. At the same time he is also the next link in history. We inscribe ourselves not only in the history of art, but also in that of our own evolution. I’d never have been able to paint what I’m painting now without having passed through other stages. Let’s say that each work is only preparation for the next one...

The real problem is : What to do with it ? How to translate it into light ? Matter is problematic. It’s filthy stuff.

The material is independent of us.

No, I don’t think so. The material : that’s what our problem is. Even when naked, we are matter. Our suffering derives not only from the human wound, but first and foremost from our being torn between matter and spirit. How to avoid falling into the trap of matter ? On the one hand, matter makes us live, on the other it impedes us from soaring away. It so happens that it sometimes scares me. It explains my great love for drawing.

In a drawing matter is reduced to a minimum, as a matter of course. But even when reduced to a pencil stroke on a piece of paper it is still always menacingly present.

When I look at a canvas by Soutine or Mondrian, I no longer see the materiality of painting. I see the luminosity, the tension, the spirituality. The inhabited painting.

That means that the problem of matter has been solved.

Completely. The material has been metamorphosed. One no longer thinks of it as such.

Only a bad canvas reminds us of the material.

One doesn’t smell the cooking, so to speak.

On the other hand, it’s amazing how painters from the Middle Ages to the Romantic era worked under a heavy load of obligations. Not only subjects and motifs were commissioned, but also colours, materials....

There were under very explicit constraints.

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Having to obey the restrictions may actually help, as restriction is needed for disobedience. That’s all man has to express himself with. I think a work is genius when it oversteps the limits that define it.

It appears that the romantic artist extricated himself from all these contractual obligations that ‘limited’ his creativity, and that the present-day artist is ‘free’. Today it’s no longer necessary to disobey, as disobedience itself has become the norm.

Besides, who or what to disobey ? The limits have become so invisible, so disguised that one notices them only by accident, fortunately, three cheers for the accident !

All great painters have been able to escape from the limits. The Crucifieds by Greco are quite distinct from those by Cranach or Van Dyck.... They are utterly marvellous works of art that by far exceed the compulsory classical practice of the Crucifixion, which has been the pre-eminent motif of the flesh.

How to paint the flesh and make us forget its materiality, and at the same time, emphasize its fragility, its wounds, its erotic force, its luminosity... The flesh as painted

by Michelangelo, Titian, Courbet, Velasquez, Schiele, Freud displaces the limits each time. Flesh is the motif that has been painted most frequently in the history of art.

If there has ever been one painter with a terribly sensual approach to the flesh, it must be Ingres. To the point where it no longer concerns eroticism or sensuality, but mysticism. His great odalisque might be an image of God. By contrast, Degas is not a painter who caresses. He peeps at women as through a key hole. His squatting women, bottoms in the air, are taken by surprise in humiliating, torturing poses. They have backbones that show their skeletons under flesh that is there to be violated. Approaching the divine through an eroticism that is none other than the splendour of cruelty. The crucifixion is not far away.

Eroticism is a dangerous subject that has played a major role in so many paintings.

Ennui creeps in very quickly, particularly in paintings that deal with it exclusively. I’m excited by certain crucifixions : Theresa of Avila pierced by the angel, those by Bernini..., the Saint Sebastians... A violent eroticism emanates from them, but it is not their subject, not their commission.

The origin of the world, by contrast, is rather tiresome... like any painting that deals with just one visible subject. That’s why political art, propaganda art...

That is occasional art. Perhaps somebody like Otto Dix was able to show genius in occasional art.

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Isn’t all art occasional ?

Just think of the magnificent portraits by Munch !

Nowadays one judges these works beyond the historical conditions of their creation.

Besides their topical political intention these paintings also possess other features that have made them survive in history.

Every artist gives an ‘image’ of his time with all that that implies. Goya exorcised the famine of his time by painting large pieces of meat.

The same goes for Grosz.

Just like Goya, Dix and Grosz are painters of urgency, of revolt. And as for their subjects, while there were no more commissions properly speaking, the circumstances (war, massacres, horror...) forced the painters to deal with certain subjects. They couldn’t do otherwise.

There is a rather wonderful anecdote concerning Picasso. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937 he painted a portrait of Dora Maar : a weeping woman stuffing her mouth with a handkerchief. He was living with Dora Maar, but he was also having an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he had a child. Stormy domestic scenes ensued.

When Picasso witnessed how Dora Maar was brought to tears by their painful marital problems, he turned this into paintings. And the paintings are terrible.

I believe that here you touch upon a fundamental notion: Picasso succeeds in transcending his topical vision to produce something entirely universal.

Yes, exactly. I’d like to conclude by referring to the fact that after the war the Dora Maar portraits became a symbol of mankind weeping, suffering because of the war, the massacres, the deportation camps... and particularly of the deceived wife. The anecdote had become a metaphor.

The artist never ceases to be on the look-out, to scrutinize. He has an unquiet gaze. The soul of the artist is a repository, a memory bank. When the need brings a canvas along, the artists uses stored events to entice a work, rather than to recreate some event.

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A great painting makes the difference as well.

Basically, I don’t know whether it is really necessary to know, and to assess, anecdotes of the painter’s life. What difference does it make ?

In Picasso’s case, what is it that really matters in the end ? The portrait of Dora Maar.

Perhaps being acquainted with the anecdote might add some power to the painting.

It depends. I don’t ignore the anecdote. But I believe that when Picasso painted Dora as a weeping woman, war was sitting next to her.

In the eyes of a lot of people, taking the anecdote into account tends to detract from the work.

Still, that’s where the main difference lies with political propaganda, for instance. Let’s look at David. He was, I believe, a genuinely great painter. After he had been appointed first painter at the court of Napoleon, he let himself lapse into propaganda painting. But he painted what I think is a sublime canvas : Marat’s Death. It’s one of the most beautiful canvases I know. And, obviously, it transcends the anecdote of Marat’s murder : it expresses more than a mere political topic and it goes way beyond the commissioning demands of the court. What disturbs me in a kind of rejection of the anecdote is that it actually remains in place, whether one wants it or not.

It’s a question of point of view. For many people, the anecdote devalues a painting. In my eyes, however, it adds to the painting’s value.

The rejection of the anecdote dates back to the impresisonists. Even Courbet was a bit afraid of the anecdote. But, basically, Cézanne, Van Gogh .... had anecdotes. I believe it’s ridiculous to say no, there’s nothing, there are only apples. Apples, indeed, are an anecdote already. Why apples and why not bananas ? The anecdote doesn’t scare me.

However, when the canvas is nothing more than an anecdote it becomes painful. In Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, the anecdote is omnipresent, but, on the

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other hand, right in the middle of this carnivalesque brothel setting the portrait of the traveller stands out. That’s where the horror lies.

The Romantic gallery at the Louvre is a fairground, isn’t it ?.

Absolutely ludicrous! [Laughter] A fairground indeed, with The Raft of the Medusa. The origin of this painting is also a crazy story : Géricault shaved his head and locked himself up for months to paint this canvas, which was subsequently badly received and which created a small scandal on the political scene of the time. He was disappointed and went into exile in England, where he took his Raft from town to town.

The studies for this work, i.e. of the severed heads and limbs of the victims are, in my opinion, of far greater quality. Géricault’s most beautiful creations are found between these great spectacles. I prefer by far the small canvases he painted after the Raft : the horse studies, the marvellous and atricious series of Monomaniacs that was commissioned by a psychatrist. In the same way he also painted five portraits of madmen, small canvases in an unfussy style and lacking any mise en scene, but much more striking than the Raft of the Medusa, which was after all a big farce. The Raft may be shocking and staggering, a bit Titanicky, but painting it isn’t.

Delacroix is another ambiguous figure who has been on my mind a lot. The Death of Sardanapalus : hard not to smile when looking at it. Whereas his Women of Algiers is a canvas that gives me a hard-on. That’s why I only bother with a painter’s real work.

So, there’s often only one canvas left.

Yes. Perhaps in the sense that it is the canvas that helps us to live. The entire Picasso doesn’t help me to live. But some canvases of his give me the courage, not only to go on painting, but also to go on living. The equivalent in literature would be Céline. The Journey is a book that drastically changed me. After his exile, his work ceased to possess nerve, energy, brilliance... style was all that remained.

One should know when to stop, know how to recognize the moment when the creative force deserts the artist and when, instead of being metamorphosed into light, the material fades into insipid repetition of sameness.

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Anyway, Céline remains the author of the Journey. I’m still fascinated by him.

I’ve published a book on Céline. He was somebody who tampered with his biography.

He made the public believe all sorts of things. He created his own character.

The discrepancy with the Journey, which is a work of humanity, a document of compassion, generosity and sadness for the human condition, appears all the more striking.... A man who writes this and then takes up an inhuman attitude... it’s both odd and tragic.

There’s a lot of scheming in Céline. And plain lying.

This is amazing, because we’ve just been talking about intelligence as the basis of all creation. It’s not out of stupidity that ....

You know, intelligence may make us suffer, may not suffice in certain situations. The stupidity of intelligent people is something fearsome !

[Laughter] That’s well put !

It is more dreadful than the sort of stupidity one comes across in the pub. All in all, the latter kind of stupidity is of no consequence.

That’s true.

But when someone intelligent sets out to be a fool, it may become serious. Because evidently he uses all his intelligence to nurture his stupidity.

Exactly.

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