Spring

The white of the mist, to paint as abstract

Mathieu Buard

Mist, cluster of droplets suspended in the air, masking in a more or less opaque manner, the sky, the surface of the soil or waters

From a certain distance, a set of fragments all together on a wall, a sea of details, a particular fog that bursts and diffracts on a single plane and at the same time, in simultaneous reading, a collection of windows and screens of paintings.

Closer, taken one by one, in an experience of lone and subtracted vision, keys and furrows, the textured topographies whose quasi-geographical arrangements, maps and planispheres with complex interlacing, describe strange timeless samples, in matter.

Halfway, miraculous, a subject imprints itself to the eye and tells his vernacular off-screen. The framing, scholar and playful, labile to tease the edges, develops a mysterious melody. And from the mist comes to light, by an effect of complete analogy, the origin of what is painted on the canvas.

Such would be the atmospheric mechanics of Mireille Blanc's works, whose practice, so precise and selective in capture and re-reading, would reveal monads in strips, crystallized capsules, reveries in which the fragment seems to display the knowledge and language of the world itself. Knowingly, the painter activates a mechanical look by this skilful game of unctuous paste traces, tactile pictorial textures. As closely as possible, the reality.

First, push a corner, and then make the spring spring**.

What presides over the painted image is first of all a withdrawal, the choice of a snapshot, an eager pause, the extraction of a situation punctured by the fleeting. This selective frame, truncates, crops, excludes to tighten the thick and the tangible in the field of visible. The plot of the plan is then constituted of this failure and the active suspension that Mireille Blanc decides to operate. Ab - stract - that is, subtract, take out of the primary source. The strangeness of the painting remains in this emergence, appearances and faults, as all the evidence declared was masking the rest by pronouncing itself, and acting as a collage without support, strangely turned on itself.

The source of these primary images is a photographic iconography of the close diversity, of the plurality of the qualities of existence, certainly of the daily life as well, not as naive eulogy but as an organized and energetic cadence of the matters that hold together, a being, sensitive and powerful.

Each photograph, the other collection of Mireille Blanc, as warburgian as it gets, is this infinite source, a plastic youth, who, past the puzzle of a turning edge, gives birth to the subject and develops the eternal question of the precision of representation. The painting of Mireille Blanc is the fulfillment of this aporia.

In the same way, the drawing in charcoal, another black haze on a layer, in its exact materiality, sets out his project - based on the photographic moment and its precise fragments - the work defines a filter of vision and pushes the future. The corner pressed here proposes to elucidate by the frame, to capture, to observe the chapters of a pictorial novel. Between Chardin and Tillmans, aknowledging the sensible world by the detail, to question the simple veracity, the abyss which it proposes, its thousand and one pretenses.

Photographic, cinematographic subject and genre, then?

The projection of an image on the canvas mist, support to paint. Figuration that will thicken and become solid, to better abstract and look at the back of the painting: that is to say, the proper materiality. By gently flirting with the melancholy of iconography, bringing the joy of the apparition, the surprise and fallacy of the concrete, the fat, the trivial -all at the same time staying out of identification alone, all against the intimate - the only intimate worthwhile here will be the excitement of this mode of appearance. The spectacular experience of this pictorial projection of images on the surface of the canvas is an achronic provocation without ellipse. The nose in the material, from one filter to another is constructed as it abstracts the possible image of a contact with the real, adventurous.

Spring for boarding.

Past the mist, like the colorful arch that unfolds in a rainy sky, like a bridge that links two banks and gives access to the neighboring country, the field of view of Mireille Blanc's paintings is explicit because it is addressed to the viewer from a particular point of view, a magnifying glass rather than a panoramic viewpoint. The pictorial assemblages of colors by plastic layers flatten themselves and fix painted natures, suave and paradoxically raw, ultra sharp though blurred by accumulations. At a fixed magical distance and constantly replayed.

From this state of arranged surfaces, ceramic trinkets, printed textiles and casual wear cloakrooms, labels on notebook and toys are put to the colored whites, at the right distance, that is to say to appear oversize. In full into the fiber, full into the enamel, full into the color and its mess, into sensational and fixed scales. Secretion and treasure.

The flow of these recurring figures, sweat, statuette, album and domestic fragment - without exception - are subject to the scales of the painter and imprint themselves to the canvas outside any logic of format. Whether the painting is physically large or picked up, the painted image does the limit zoom, the last good adjustment, the fine performative tuning, which is the last step before confusion, emptiness or indistinction. The spectrum of colors, the shimmering reflections and the pictorial cream structure an open and long time, without latency. The touch is moving, plural and circumstantial, sometimes a rotating line, a dry droplet, a twisted spot and a stealthy point. Spring of the form, transient.

In hollow, the work of the paintings of Mireille Blanc, like a set behind a window covered with Meudon colorations, contradicts the speed of the digital tense flow, the incontinence of the contemporary image, the emptiness of the framing shows, the false blur and the poverty of the telegenic image enamored of the multiplicity of screens; not responsive.

The painter agitates the kitsch of the imagery of trinkets, of these folklores to slip into these objects of collection detours and counterfeits in order to better structure the great story of her painting, the pleasure of dissolving the real, to find the beautiful in the power of touch, colorful sensations, sort of a pictorial software. By countering the evidences, here every object becomes matter. The paintings of Mireille Blanc are those of splinters and splinters, of light of moments that come to rest with solid mist.

Of matte and brilliant natures, everything suddenly becomes blocks and sheets of matter. Far from digital inconsistency, the hardware of oils and pigments. The thickness of the painted paste fixes the vaporous abstraction. The voluptuousness of the traces leaves in its plenitude the free fields, powdered and vernacular deserts. Boarding. That the constellation of the hanging multiplies. Intense experience, highware. What is painted then restores the enjoyment of the filters that are added, pleasure of the pictorial layer that gradually dresses the surface of the canvas. Mireille Blanc cancels the artificial sails, the parasitic and transfigured figuration, by matter.

Without ambiguity.