Blooming

Art is a making, it is what comes to mind when entering the Yves Zurstrassen’s studios, when immediately the profusion of images encourages to enter the invariant protocol of the artist’s work to discover its singularity, the meticulous orchestration of the paper forms previously cut and deposited on the canvas, the successive covering of paint and take-offs, to achieve this epiphany of a revealed image when the painting is finished. For nearly 40 years, he has installed in this «making» the conditions of reappearance of an image where the exchanges he maintains with art history are deformed, transformed and also perpetuated, with all these long looked at painters who created this memorial frame with which he paints and reinvents in a «performative» way where it is the attitudes that become forms, in a very vitalist and almost musical action made of ruptures, repetitions, variations of the same theme.

The paintings gathered in this exhibition Blooming, recent for the most part, appear as a polytonal proposal, both visual and musical. An expressive proposition in the repetition of the same process, made of ornamental or pictorial motifs both similar and dissonant that we must hear as musical motifs when we know, indeed, that the artist paints as one composes music and admits the fact that jazz accompanies him permanently. “I’m like a musician, he says, sometimes I play alone, sometimes I play with other painters around me. In my memory, in my hands, I sometimes play in a quartet or more: in a large orchestra formation…”.

So, in the movement of shapes and colors, in this apparent and highly contrapunctic simplicity, how not to hear the Blue note of a jazz piece in his Indigo series, a piece by Miles Davis in his Enigma series, a general Free time in the solar of sunny day and Summertime which allows him, apart from any musical measure or rhythmic signature, to install on his paintings something immaterial, intuitive and fluid, like a jazz improvisation gently awakened by polyphonic bursts. A Free time as if it were to paint surrounded by his jazzmen friends Joëlle Léandre or Evan Parker, in the happiness of a shared free time, a kind of ultra contemporary “lunch on the grass” when all rustles of happy complicities, when everyone has forgotten his talent and virtuosity to simply be there, together, in the joy of a musical and aesthetic sharing, in the perfect match between painting and music.

We then hear this joy when, looking at this set of paintings, erases everything related to the technique used, forgotten the stencils of blank newspaper, forgotten the efficient cutting machines connected to a computer, forgotten the collage and the take-off of forms, the succession of applications of additions and withdrawals, these superimposed layers of forms that add or subtract, forgotten the play of the backgrounds and the marks of a time trapped in the very realization of the canvas, the speed of the gesture, the future perfect of this upside down work, remain only this joy and the euphoria of a kind of dancing sensuality in the visual polyphony, the musical color of a surface where some whites of great brilliance, some deep blues, some beiges that have kept the memory of gold and pink and that seem to have concentrated in a harmony of retained tones as if not to surrender to the delicious ease of color, meet other paintings where, on the contrary, the color explodes like in an endless summer.

We would like to begin to paint, compose or write in the poetic act of an “all brought to oneself” while we dream of meeting the paradises of Klee and the Matissian interiors, the paintings of Shirley Jaffe or Rauschenberg, the chords of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp or Ornette Coleman, the polyphonic ricercare of Bach’s Musical Offering, Mallarmé’s "lips that the air of the virgin azure starve", Rimbaud’s "and the terrible Infinity frightened your blue eye”, Saint-John Perse’s «we will not always live in these yellow lands, our delight», we would like to enter into this visual music, that of mica stones and sky traveled, those of Andalusia and Provence for Yves Zurstrassen, yes, we never paint or write on the tabula rasa, we are all following a course that is our real curriculum.

One would like, as a note played in its perfection makes hear the noise that God makes while walking on the sand, paint filled with all this “brought to oneself”, reach the resplendent blossoming of a reinvented image, it would show this expected Blooming, which would then contain, by its abstraction, a part of sacred, «the shift towards the religious as soon as the subject fades» as Bernard Ceysson says.

The seven canvases painted in 2024 for La halle des bouchers in Vienne are the perfect example, with their mineral tone, their chromatic sobriety, their Cistercian stone light that opens to contemplation and meditation.

Yves Zurstrassen claims this share of reinvention and sacredness. Each of his vast studios hesitates between the factory and the cloister and it is in solitude and silence, even if it is musical, that he composes his paintings, that occurs the return of lost affects and nostalgic signs, forgotten or buried images, his own memories and experiences. It is in the silence of this solitary work that reappeared between the imposed rule and the adventurous risk, in the expected surprise, a new image, an image-object. Each of the paintings tries, in its blossoming, its Blooming, to go beyond what has risen in this own personal fund to impose itself to us by the eye and the listening, using in turn its austere force or its solar glare, its watermark phrasing, its silent music but also, sometimes, on muted flat painting areas, its bursts and the dazzling rhythm of joyful and decorative forms when the bursts and jubilations of color occur.

It is therefore to share this joy and this blooming of painting that he invites us. That of a free jazz of great freedom, which, in the dilution of the same theme repeated from one painting to another or in the linearity of the melodic flow proper to each series, can be heard even in the silence of the gallery spaces. By being a little attentive, will appear atonal breakaways, the very blues range of dissonances, chord grids or at least a kind of spreading and invasive music, like the one we hear in daydreams, the music that carries with it the happiness of living in the sweetness of a clear, colorful and very jazzy end of summer.