Nothing exists without language you say, and yet the phrases that you insert into your paintings don't always refer to what is shown?
No, indeed, it's important that there is a difference. Otherwise it would be an illustration and that holds no interest for me at all. The use of language is also linked to my interest in literature, and for poetry in particular. What a poem says is not always what it tells us, something else is at work. All of these shifts and distances interest me. Even in the perception of a painting, this has consequences on the way in which we look at it. Once something is written, the spectator is forced to read it. He or she cannot do otherwise. Even if the time is quite short, there is always a moment when he will read while at the same time looking and this will free up his vision. He doesn't look at the painting as an assembly of known and identifiable colours and forms, he is reading and during that time he sees without needing any specific knowledge. This induces a tiny fraction of forgetting and a de-centring of perception.
You seem to have a predilection for anything that creates mystery and works towards a multiplicity of interpretations. For hidden things. When it comes to you are we dealing with a painter who does not wish to become a prisoner of his own images? Who questions the vision that we have of the real and who concentrates just as much on what is hidden as what is shown?
I absolutely do not want to be imprisoned by an image because I think that painting is not an image. Even when it represents something very specific, painting is never just an image. Donald Judd said: “Painting is a counter image”, Phillipe Sollers said exactly the same thing based on a thinking that was certainly very different. If it is simply a matter of creating images, then there is no point in painting. One can do something else, and the examples are multiple, both inside and outside of art. So, in effect, we could say that I use kinds of strategies. Does this allow us to see the real differently? I don't know. In any case I hope that it allows us to see painting differently, or at least see it better. Knowing that I don't impose any particular interpretation even though I may say many things about paintings, about polyptychs, about connections. But I want there to be always an extra meander in the stream that allows one to make a small detour and catch up with the flow, allowing each person to engage their own vision from that point onwards.
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Extract from an interview with Marie Jeanne Caprasse – Bruno Perramant.
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