« Because, at the end, what’s the man in the nature? Anything in face of the infinity, everything in face of nothing, in the middle of anything and everything. Infinitively far from the comprehension of extremes, the end of the things and their principles are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret, equally unable to see the nothing from he comes from, and the infinity where he has swallowed up. PASCAL, “Thoughts”
Because finally, what I am, in front of Patricia Dubien’s painting?
A questioning in face of his infinity, a vertigo in face of his horizon, a midlines in between of sky and earth.
Infinitively far from plains’ comprehension, the limit of spaces and their principles for me are invincibly hidden in a difficultly penetrable secret, equally unable to see the nothing of an endless landscape where I loose myself in interrogations.
That’s for instance in a first time, I don’t see in front of me anything but some flat landscapes cut by (floating) lines until the horizon. The nearer, reading the works’ title, I discover the evidence of dominants colours: blue, yellow, brown, etc…
Sometimes, the etiquettes (cartels) become a little more talkative, providing some rather brief details: marine blue, lemon green…Yet it’s at the beginning of the title of these elementary observations that I become conscious of the infinity of these images who concentrate in the radical end of the painting.
In front of me, an “a plat” of monochrome oil colour often occupies the inferior half of the canvas, who nominates itself declaring the infinitive strength of its presence.
In a frontal position facing the pictorial wall of a construction that brings other elements of contrasting colours piled up the base.
The weight of these amalgamated colours makes the chords of tones screeching, reversing the illusions of remoteness, for example a first level of a cold colour, because it’s surmounted by a surprisingly coloured band of an hot tone, create the perspective by reaffirming the verticality of the painting.
Patricia cuts to the quick making exhaling into these backgrounds of unified colour, some hazardous lines of black china ink.
The painting of fat and opaque oil seems to split up making to emerge the liquidity of the horizontal injuries.
The integrity of painted forms tears up onto the infinity of obscures deeps.
These fractured and broken lines don’t make me think any longer about an alignment of trees and hedges, but penetrate the painting with cracks of a deep infinity.
And that’s how I discover the photographs of the painter artist. The opacity of colours, firmly put on canvas is replaced by the bright shining of manual impression, and the large monochrome spaces juxtapose as many intensively coloured surfaces.
Patricia explains to me that she aims at natural elements at the ground level or at the aquatic surfaces.
For the magic of the enlargements, some minimalistic spaces are fixed on scale one.
That’s how some minuscule vegetables insinuate, and this time at the place of inscribing in deepness, like the inks make in the oil painting, they seem to proliferate organically into microscopic growth.
These pictures/paintings washed by wet slides invite me to dreaming in front of the infinity of beaches swept of light.
Either in painting or photography, when the artist uses the verticality of the format, she reinforces the frontlet of her artwork.
The paintings, on their superior part makes my head to be into the clouds, the only elements painted with realism, whereas paradoxically again they are the only ones to express their immateriality.
The painter artist gives me at first the impression of infinite perspectives for in reality straightening up in front of me the direction of my look towards an illusively far sky.
And that’s how my look that hasn’t ended to engrave from low to high the plainness of these paintings, can beside the diptychs “panoramizing” from left to the right.
Some panoramic extensions external to the format insinuate into the faults inked of fluidity for conquering a mental space that I place with evidence in the tight emptiness cutting vertically in two the diptych, in order to giving to it a sense.
This panoramic extension, I find it in a video. “Où vas-tu? (“Where do you go?”) that in the space/time this time makes Patricia to be able to associate pictures/paintings and images in motion.
Some waves can partially wash away these landscaped surfaces and drown these coloured heaths according to the alternate rhythm of tides.
Really naturally the artist/set designer arranges in diptychs some numerical photography taken from video, that she presents in an horizontal format.
So this raise to the surface, this superposition of images, this perpetual sliding, thanks to this placing in space makes myself immersing in the heart of a world of unlimited perspectives and to end in the secret depth of her material.
Because, first of all, the work of Patricia Dubien nurtures and nurtures herself of infinities of painting.
Shadows still pass too fast or take their time ; here space is multiplied and awaits my comprehension and already the question : « how is it done?” For I dare not enunciate “how does it work?”, I always demand of a photograph that I leave the imprint of a place and not a moment, a reality and not a draught of the imaginary, the image of a memory, but not its emotion, am I being too figurative? Or lazy. And must we always, because of some ancient curse, look for what we already know or could see elsewhere, in is icon? Recognition: this is a tree, this is really an apple, here is the sea, here is a landscape, next to this landscape is the same landscape a different time of day, okay, this is a winter or somewhere else, look, oh, a cloud, a film set of a Western, the wind has blown through here a fury through a song, but a walk about it without having seen it; painting could be livable image, and preferably lived in, the ancient memory of my discovery of the Louvre and those painted girls (nudes: I like being told a story), painting and its long slow labor and I am thankful for the images of Patricia Dubien. When I see them, I tell myself the stories I need, I can travel without fear of getting lost and I live in them and settle into them, into the turmoil of searching for myself at the bottom of a cavern; first I look for my reflection, pride, I must still think and recognize the vision and odd imaginings. I recognize them: I know them, I am seeing them again. Inadequate, I feel, I’m not inside them enough. I wait I must learn, I must listen to her, I must speak of her
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