Gilles Balmet
Texte d'Elisabeth Chambon, conservateur du musée Géo-Charles
Catalogue Gilles Balmet / Somewhere here on Earth / Fage éditions
La démarche de Gilles Balmet s'inscrit dans l'idée qu'une
image se dévoile mais jamais comme on aurait imaginé qu'elle
se donne. Un présent impulsif dans l'encre ou la peinture, soufflée,
pulvérisée ou transférée, dans un relevé
" presque sismographique " comme l'artiste le précise.
L'oeuvre devient surface d'accumulation par une série de gestes
élémentaires dans un désordre guidé. Sans
pour autant négliger la symétrie (récurrente dans
les travaux) Gilles Balmet cultive sa disponibilité aux changements
et aux surprises, vers le mouvant ou l'impalpable caractéristiques
de ses oeuvres. Comme un organisme avec sa vie propre, ses aventures,
l'art de Gilles Balmet se refuse à devenir l'objet de quelque
classification que ce soit. Son art se construit au plus près
des intuitions, mais aussi dans un scénario de " rapt "
d'images, dans une élaboration très personnelle et ceci
dans une apparente neutralité. L'artiste parfois s'éclipse
pour mieux laisser forme et couleur investir l'espace. Un geste-image
pensé comme une attitude et vécue comme telle, acceptant
les possibilités du fantastique et pourquoi pas de l'élément
érotique qui comme dans la musique de Prince (titre d'une de
ses chansons repris pour l'exposition) polarise l'attention de l'autre
par son corps. Il y a du corps dans cette démarche séductrice
qui détient l'éventuelle décision de maintenir
une tension suspendue: quelque chose aussi entre innocence et risque
à être. Des paysages (est-ce le bon terme ?) plutôt espaces de conspiration
du hasard, chasseur infatigable. " Combien de royaumes nous ignorent
" disait Pascal; ceux de Gilles Balmet semblent ouverts, même
si leur lieu d'être reste énigmatique et aléatoire.
Il régente leur sort, les fait glisser vers autre chose qui ne
dit pas son nom mais épouse le trajet de la main qui l'a lancé.
Pas de préalable, c'est être juste dans l'accident, s'y
tenir, dans l'invisible, juste attentif à dérégler
le temps vécu. Les séries se combinent les unes aux autres
en une sorte de généalogie parfaitement assumée. Il y a enfin dans ce travail comme "le style de vie de jeune artiste
" qui fait déborder le discours habituel. Par-delà
le temps, par-delà le corps, la variété des éléments
utilisés, les sédimentations qui en résultent composent
une sorte de famille qui aurait laissé de côté toute
effusion ou attitude émotionnelle. Elisabeth Chambon
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ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Letting time go
Gilles Balmets approach derives from the idea that an image never reveals itself as we might have imagined it doing. Through a series of elementary gestures in guided disorder, an impulsive instantaneity in ink or paint atomised, vaporised or transferred becomes a surface for accumulation in a survey which, as the artist puts it, is «almost seismographic». Without neglecting symmetry (a recurring feature), he cultivates a receptiveness to change and surprise in the direction of the labile and impalpable characteristics of his art, which, like an organism living a life of its own, resists becoming the object of any classification. It has a good deal to do with intuition, but also involves «seizures» of images by means of very personal elaborations, and in apparent neutrality. The artist sometimes slips into the background, allowing form and colour to take centre stage. Image-gestures, thought out as attitudes, and experienced as such, accept the possibilities of the fantastic, and why not? the erotic, which, as with Prince (one of whose songs gives the exhibition its title), polarises perception. The body comes into this seductive approach with the right to maintain a certain tension, as well as something between innocence and a risk of being. Balmet has an unerring ability to interconnect territories, facts and
cultures (notably that of Japan), and to engage with other inspirational
artists and works. In paintings, drawings, videos and photographs, and
whether it be a question of appearance or disappearance, he indexes
the immaterial. His projects cover a range of domains linked only by
a simple thought process and a modus operandi of movements and procedures
that are irreducible Landscapes (if that is the right term), or spaces for conspiracies of chance an indefatigable hunter. How many realms ignore us, said Pascal. Those of Balmet are open, even if their places of being remain enigmatic and random. He determines their destiny, moving them in the direction of something that does not utter its name, but follows the trajectory of the hand that set it in motion. An absence of preliminaries means being accurate in the accidental, and holding onto it in invisibility, while making sure to deregulate lived time. The different series interact, in a perfectly assumed genealogy. Balmets works derive from decisions that express a number of choices: coloured inks, immersion tanks, tarpaulins, phials for cosmetics, dispensing flasks, vaporisers the paraphernalia of a merchant who, though he feels he may have freed himself from the logic of overly plausible poetry, has some doubts about reality, which he keeps at a respectable distance. Materials are what the artist uses to test himself as a player, and he takes this risk in the hope that something of his empirical experimentations will be disclosed.The resulting animated surface can be interpreted, both spatially and temporally. Spurning spectacularisation, it defines itself as an event. Nothing is an object, but there are paths, deposits, quests for the nearest and the farthest; and always, as in the 2010 series Nid (Nest), Construction Lines and Breaking the Lines, a black note that crosses the possibilities of inks, folds, and, above all, the freehand line. Over-detailed description is inimical to identifiability. Withoutresorting to mentalism and its possible reductiveness, one might imagine the breath of a passerby, immediately elsewhere. In the clusters of spots and lines one can make out the essence of the artists presence, appearing-disappearing. Perception is all in wonder. Form and non-form interpenetrate, free of formal anticipation. Earth and sky merge in the Reliefs and Eruption series (also dating from 2010), with remanent force fields and flawed or fallow territories. Anything can intervene, in any order, in a friable world of hurried beings who do not say where they are coming from, but continue on their wandering way. In this work, in the end, there is something like the lifestyle of the young artist that pushes normal discourse beyond itself. Beyond time and the body also, the variety of the elements used, and the consequent sedimentations, make up a sort of family that has put aside effusions and emotional attitudes. It is not compartmentalised time that dictates this approach, but exploratory time, and a complex process of creation that invents a world at the intersection of the external and the intimate
Élisabeth Chambon |