Ceysson & Bénétière

Two colors, no more, was the title of Christian Floquet's 2003 solo exhibition at the MAMCO in Geneva. It followed up one of the basic rules of his painting, another being the use of square or rectangular shapes which are also found in the format of the paintings. Two industrial colors applied with a brush on a canvas that is never framed – and whose edges are never painted – presenting flat areas that are non-expressive from the point of view of gesture (no trace of the hand passing to and fro can be seen here) and fully given over to their superficial aspect. This asceticism of painting and its practice, directly inherited from the modernist avant-garde movements, is not as simple as it appears. For it is enough to draw close to a painting by Christian Floquet to see how the declared economy of his painting highlights a fundamental fact: it is not possible, as soon as two colors are caught in two forms, to deal with a purely film-like treatment of the working surface. In other words, even with a modeling vocabulary that is limited to such an extreme extent, there is always depth that emerges from flat areas of color, however constant, spread out and strict they may be.  

If, for example, we look at the largest painting in the exhibition, Sans titre n° 14 (2021), which is made up of rectangular blue and violet flat tints, laid out obliquely on the canvas – which is also one of the constants of this art – and as if nested inside each other, it is impossible to know which were painted first, because each one can alternately take over from the other, thus opening up a minimal and operative depth: the surface does not let itself be overcome as it is always more or less – and already – a flattened depth (a "flat depth", as the art historian Jean Clay would put it). What this form of painting shows, what it has been exploring for nearly forty years, is its very impossibility, its glorious operative failure: even on the surface of the canvas, there is always a painted thickness, and thus the fabrication of a manifest pictorial illusion. Even without a narrative or illustrative will, the painted image contradicts the superficiality of the subjective in order to open up a background, however thin and fine it may be. Even without wanting to say so, painting does not cease to create an illusion.

This is what this exhibition shows once again. It is the fourth exclusively devoted to Christian Floquet by the Ceysson & Bénétière gallery: the first in New York, the others having been in Paris (2014), Saint-Étienne (2017) and Luxembourg (2020). His latest works will be on display, notably square paintings with colored squares placed obliquely in their centre: diamond shapes. Here too, the surface asserts itself and surprises us, not to say deceives us: it is enough to scrutinize it to be caught up in the vertigo of confrontation and aspiration, confrontation between two colored flat areas that touch each other without mixing; a visual aspiration through this positive and dynamic confrontation which leaves us in a state of incessant astonishment due to its eternally undecidable outcome.   

Thierry Davila, 2021