Pierre-Marie COITEUX
Artistic Reflections
If a certain painting belongs to an era, the following era accepts it as the norm.
Its simple explanations, make it appear conventional for nature and necessity. The demon of change for change sake is the mother of many things. It throws a fine mess into truth, truth into purity, purity into the absurd, and the absurd into flattery.
What one can call “Grand Art” is simply art which requires all one’s faculties to be engaged, and these works of art are such that all the faculties of another are involved and need one to be interested enough to understand.
Is there anything more admirable than the transition from vague to precise, being the fundamental objective of the artist, which can be as strong and all-embracing as the need to make love, drives him?
Nothing more beautiful than the strong desire, the sensitivity and the science, combined over a period of time, the means to the end, the chance and the choice, the substance and the accident, the precision and the jaded, the material and the form, the power and the resistance, like the glowing, the strange, the restrained battle of the sexes, comprising all the energy of human life, to arouse one after the other, and create.
The presence, the present is not only in the canvases.
Art is a special extension of myself. The extension does not have to be an abstraction of me; that’s why Art has to be socially engaged. In painting a changeable landscape, it has to be seen as a commitment to all, which tends to systematically destroy the gentleness of life.
But it is not nostalgia for the past.
To have possession of Nature, just as with a woman one is in love with, and to be possessed by her. So, from this intimate connection between the painter and his subject, will be established a mysterious dialogue, born from multiple emotions and thus begins the adventure, different today from yesterday and what will be tomorrow.
Because it is precisely that, painting with a sincere heart and spirit.
The artist has to rethink in new terms his approach according to the outside reality. Because there is not just one truth in Art; everyone sees a painting according to their own cultural journey and their sensibility.
It is not only a chaotic open buffet; you find what you bring to it; each appropriating in their turn, and the new owner sees their own truth, which can be different from the first truth.
Memory is not to remember but to become; she does not turn any more than the painted sun remembers the sun, but rather becomes the sun. What the artist sees, he does not take possession of; he does not have any means other than to offer to the world as he paints her, in turning around to be free of the image, and to engage her and even possess her.
I paint a quiet warning.
You don’t have to dread an objective reality as it is we ourselves who appear from the conduit moulded from our own fingers. The colour of the painting is not the colour of the world. The painting is a world, but not the world, even when it shows in it the images.
A painting must above all express the intimate thoughts of the artist who dominates his model, and not the artist as as a slave to the subject. The layers on being simplified, become compressed. Simplifying the composition to enhance the rhythm of the colours.
I am wedded to colour. I speak with my colours; listen to me with your eyes.
Painting with colours which are joyful and which carry with them strength and peace.