« 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]

<< SURFACE AND SENSITIVITY, Robert Flynn Johnson

in LES JEUX SECULAIRES, Editions d'Art Somogy, 2004

 

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
Goethe

We live in an age of increasing standardization.  Powerful forces in government and commerce have used an ever more inclusive and invasive media to convince us of our likes and dislikes … our wants and needs.  One must be vigilant against the onslaught of the ordinary that attempts to invade and control our aesthetic and moral judgment.  The American philosopher Henry David Thoreau said “we should treat our minds as innocent and ingenious children whose guardians we are—be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.”  It has never been enough for artists to be original or creative.  It is equally imperative that there be those who have the patience to see and the wisdom to reflect on that art.  In the majority of the arts, one’s experience is of physical passivity.  In theater, dance, opera, music, cinema and video the viewer has the art unfold over time before them.  It is only in the written word and art that the individual is in complete control through the conferring of one’s own attention and reflection over time.  That is an individualization of creative experience that cannot easily be manipulated by outside forces.  Alas, it is also true that serious reading and serious looking take a personal commitment of time that is difficult and not encouraged in our increasingly frantic modern society.  It is a skill, habit, inclination, or whatever one might call it that is in danger of extinction in many by lack of use.  It is less important what we care and feel passionately about aesthetically as long as we care about something.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes, discussing photography in his influential book Camera Lucida, uses the terms Studium and Punctum in discussing the general characteristics of art (photography) and the special and precise qualities that make us care about a particular work.  Studium refers to the general and recognizable information that we glean from the hundreds of images we come in contact with every day.  However, Barthes states that in certain works there is something—a gesture, a pose, a juxtaposition—that elevates them which he calls the Punctum.  Barthes wrote:
“The record element will break (or punctuate) the Studium.  This time it is not I who will seek it out (as I invest the field of the Studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.  A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument:  the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points.  This record element which will disturb the Studium I shall therefore call Punctum, for Punctum is also:  sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also the cast of the dice.  A photograph’s Punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”

Barthe’s sense of Punctum is everywhere present in the art of Pierre-Marie Brisson.  The artist combines various elements of experience, which we have all observed at different times and places, yet never before at a single time and place, except through his art.

Someone once said that art is not a form of communication but a vehicle for sharing experience between artist and viewer.  The art of Brisson fits this description.  It is rich with layers of artistic expression capable of unlocking repressed or forgotten levels of memory in individuals.  But for this to happen requires that individual viewers be willing to pause long enough not only to look, but also to feel the meaning of his work.

We live in a culture overflowing with the sleek modern designs of our consumer age.  These products serve their purposes through function, efficiency, and a certain style … yet for many there is a subconscious awareness of loss.  Art and the rich surface of age that emanates from something of beauty appreciated over time is that missing component that many yearn for in their lives.  Europeans through their substantial cultural history are much more aware of and comfortable with this concept.  As Phillipe Jullian commented, “The French collector … is not afraid of dust and scratches; he is at ease in that sordid saleroom of the Hôtel Drouot:  the only place in Paris still to wallow in the world of Balzac and Daumier, the last theater of the Human Comedy, which has come down to us with all its grime and all its treasures.”

There is an alchemy in the art of Pierre-Marie Brisson that creates a mood of weathered beauty and elegant decay through the creation and destructions of his surfaces.  Their visual presence evokes memories as surely as those reawakened by a scent or a sound.  These elements may include the rough surface of an ancient wall, the craquelure of old paint, the decorative pattern of wallpaper and woven fabric, and the minimal shorthand figuration done either through the assurance of artistic sophistication or the inherent practice of archaic beliefs.  Brisson’s art is very chic and new, yet timeworn and antique.  It is avant-garde and ingenious yet linked visually and spiritually to primitive sensibilities.  Finally, it is skillfully crafted with the best materials, yet part of its success rests with our sense that his works are fashioned from the ugly, discarded fragments of our disposable civilization, rescued and revitalized by the hand of an artist. 

Picasso could have been speaking of Brisson when he said, “I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done.  What’s the point of that?  Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.”  Pierre-Marie Brisson creates an art that invites, no, demands repeated viewing over time.  His paintings, drawings and prints, like the best of poetry, cinema and fine art, ask more questions than they answer.

Art is a continuity:  it goes forward yet ever looks backward.  Pierre-Marie Brisson is not one to obscure his sources of inspiration.  His artistic roots are buried deep in the soil of his native France, reaching back even to prehistory, to the mystical renderings on the cave walls of Lascaux.  At the time of those drawings, art truly was a form of magic.  To paint a bison being brought down by the tribe on a cave wall was to predict and thus assure the success of a future hunt.  Brisson reintroduces the primeval in his work.  However, like a good jazz musician, developing a riff, he slips a recognizable image in and out of our understanding while always maintaining the sense of unified composition.

Brisson has twentieth century influences as well.  In the nineteen-forties and early fifties, Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains transformed the look of layers of torn and discarded posters from the streets of Paris into a rough but carefully controlled form of collage.  This use of refuse transformed into fine art is linked to the earlier Dada movement, but its overall sense of line (created through tearing) and color made it a European version of Abstract Expressionism.  Brisson’s work exhibits similar characteristics.

Jean Dubuffet in his dark, thickly impastoed paintings of the nineteen-forties and fifties are an even stronger link to the spirit that Brisson displays in his work.  Dubuffet believed in art but not in beauty.  He wanted his works to challenge rather than seduce.  Dubuffet wrote:

“I believe beauty is nowhere.  I consider this notion of beauty as completely false.  I refuse absolutely to assent to this ideal that there are ugly persons and ugly objects.  This idea is for me stifling and revolting.  I think the Greeks are the ones, first, to purport that certain objects are more beautiful than others.  The so-called savage nations don’t believe in that at all.  They don’t understand when you speak to them of beauty… what is strange is that, for centuries and centuries, and still now more than ever, the men of occident dispute which are the beautiful things and which are the ugly ones.  All are certain that beauty exists without doubt but one cannot find two who agree about the objects which are endowed.  And from one century to the next, it changes.  The occidental culture declares beautiful, in each century, what is declared ugly in the preceding one.”

Like a complex wine or an unfamiliar cuisine, the art of Pierre-Marie Brisson takes time to acclimate on one’s aesthetic palate.  It is the mixture of the familiar and the fragmented—the sweet of recognition and the tart of the unknown that is both entrancing and bedeviling.  Over one hundred and eighty years ago Eugene Delacroix commented on the challenge and rewards of being an artist when he wrote, “Outside of the happiness of being praised, there is the happiness of addressing all souls that can understand yours, and so it comes to pass that all souls meet in your painting.  What good is the approbation of friends?  It is quite natural that they should understand you; so what importance is there in that?  What is intoxicating is to live in the mind of others.”
Visual and emotional pleasures await those who allow the art of Pierre-Marie Brisson to quietly invade their consciousness.

Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco