« Even if there can be tracks, splashes of paint and relief, the essential lies in the scraping, the trailing, the meticulous excavation like on an archaeological dig, the hunt for ghosts hidden between two layers or levels, »
Michel Butor, writer.
« Pierre Marie Brisson is a facile draughtsman, a superb and sensitive colorist, a master of design and composition, and a creator of richly tactile surfaces. » Robert Flynn Johnson, curator.
« These images remind us of something, a precious and gentle memory… »
Jean Rouaud, writer.
[Press Review]
in LE CHEMIN DES GESTES, Editions d'Art Somogy, 2004
Pierre Marie Brisson is a painter. Right, I have said it, now we can move on. What pleasure to prepare one’s canvas by sticking paper on it, then slathering it with colors that one fetches at the break of day when the blues are still impalpable and then leads all the way to a blood-red sunset. Colors that one takes tenderly to the point of dizziness and fainting away. Brisson, as I said, is a painter and even a born painter because you do not become what you are. As for those who bedeck themselves with that title without having had the good fortune to have been born armed with brushes, however many modish tricks and gimmicks they try to pull, their canvases will always exude a vague whiff of decorative fuss, if not grease. Though it must be said that if Brisson was born a painter, he could easily have been a cook, dancer, horse breeder, athlete of combat sports, gladiator in the amphitheater, driver in a circus or pink trapeze artist up high at the Medrano circus.
The colors he uses make the mouth water, and it is easy to imagine the mash he makes on his palette so as to come up with that aubergine tone on the canvas that titillates our palette while evoking images of our old Mediterranean. Brisson’s chromatic stock comes from the same cauldrons as those of the dyers who simmered their purple on the corner of alleys in Suburra or, even further away, near the tombs of Crete, Paestum, or Tarquinia.
If he borrows these curdled reds, these mouldering beiges, these drifting ochres from the palette of some Minoan artist or the later efforts of Nero’s painter Fabulus, who gave us the frescoes and grotesques of the Domus Aurea, then he took them in their present state. Brisson is a painter of memory. Not that he is obsessed with the past, or is one of those artists who have signed up to one of the historicist tendencies. He mines our old tufa. For him it is the traces that count. Imprints, fossilized gestures that he revives with a quick stroke of the charcoal. He collects debris. His eye accumulates.
All he keeps from the great banquet of the Aldobrandine Wedding are the reliefs. Leftovers for a new dish. An art-historical hash? There is nothing better, even in painting. And let no one say that our artist is indulging in the pleasure of collage here.
Whereas Balzac’s faiseur would look at fir trees and imagine the fortune to be made from matches, Brisson sees the match and imagines the fir trees. He is an archaeologist of the imagination. His most recent exhibition, Les Jeux séculaires was a real excavation report. Knossos and, with it, the whole Greek and Latin world emerging from the folds of a wave. The wine-dark water around L’Île de Dia evoke not Ariadne abandoned by Theseus or Dionysos, but a solitary adolescence. His L’Étreinte brings to mind Lucretius’ terrible lines on love, describing lovers in the night, desperate and exhausted by their efforts to find each other.
For the new series of paintings put before us here, Brisson has chosen the generic title Le Chemin des gestes. This would be the moment to proffer some chic theories invoking Heidegger and his Holzwege, those paths leading nowhere. Or to summon help from Rilke. But theory is uniformly gray. And these days there is no shortage of theoreticians and pedants in the world of painting. Brisson is not one of them. He is an artist who, like a hunter, watches out for a movement made in times past, one that traverses the years in successive leaps and imprints itself on his canvas like an echo.
Dance, the supreme quintessence of gesture, is represented here by paintings suggestively titled, Entre deux rondes. A round, a child’s dance, of course, where we learn grace. The handsome men do this, the pretty women do that. No doubt. And then one can also see it as a homage to the ballerina. Degas’ ballerina, but also Toulouse Lautrec’s. “La Goulue,” pulling on her stocking. Entre deux rondes is also the title of a ballet by Serge Lifar, in homage to Degas’ danseuses. The stage set represented a room in a museum. And the ronde, this time, was the guardian’s round, which makes us all square pegs.
Listen to Brisson’s paintings. There is music here. He could say of his gaze what the poet says of his:
To fill it is all that remains,
That and the joy, unrepenting,
At loving things resembling