Ceysson & Bénétière

Marc Devade has held a crucial, prominent and unique position within the Supports/Surfaces movement. From the outset, it was clear that his work in no way subscribed to the program followed by Daniel Dezeuze and Patrick Saytour, and promulgated by Claude Viallat in his lapidary statement. Under the guise of a critique of Clement Greenberg’s, Diane Waldman’s and Robert Mangold’s Kantian formalism, his essay entitled "La peinture vue d'en-bas" (Painting from below) published in October 1973 in Peinture. Cahiers théoriques, can read as a charge against the provincial artists of the "group", in his view doomed to a mechanistic materialism of the material, a belief in formal autonomy and the defense of an idealistic continuity denying the disruptive power of a truly dialectical materialism. Greenberg's formalist reduction and primacy of the visual resulted in a shift from metaphysics to positivism, producing museographic and commercial objects. This conflict emerged in 1970, after Patrick Saytour and Claude Viallat reported on the Support/Surface exhibition held at the ARC (December 1970 - January 1971). In Les Lettres françaises of March 10, 1971, Louis Cane clearly stated the reasons for this foretold split. In his archives, Jacques Lepage then thoroughly documented the twists and turns of the dispute between 1970 and 1972. Claude Viallat left the group before it was legally created on August 5, 1971, and the split was confirmed on June 22, 1972, when Daniel Dezeuze in turn left. De facto, the group was dissolved. Deploring Marc Devade's reconciliation with "the dealer Templon " that celebrated "the union of Supports/Surfaces with Art Language (the advent of the worst avant-garde)", Daniel Dezeuze denounced the "bureaucratic centralism" of the review Tel Quel.

The roots of the opposition were above all ideological, which should not be taken lightly. The above-mentioned essay looked to accuse the “provincials” of evils mostly attributed to Clement Greenberg. The stumbling block, the crux of the dispute, was the status of the relationship between theory and practice. For Claude Viallat and the “provincials”, practice took precedence over theory. Implicitly Aristotelian, they were the proponents of a basic -almost pre-Socratic in Viallat's case- materialism. As for Daniel Dezeuze, he was then an assiduous attendant of Althusser’s lectures, who strove to update Marx's ideas freed from the “realizations” that had tarnished them. On the other hand, Marc Devade - and Louis Cane in his wake - did not want to dissociate practice from theory, which he saw as inseparable and consubstantial in an almost theological sense. I mean Mao style. The necessary overcoming of an impoverished and exhausted Stalinist Marxism, as practiced by the French communists, was only possible after integrating psychoanalysis- that of Freud and Lacan explained by Julia Kristeva - and Saussurian structuralism revised by Barthes and a few others in an effective crystallization. While, of course, dialectically linking this theoretical avant-gardism to Mao Zedong’s politically avant-gardist thinking. The East has always provided the West with the indispensable “Otherness” necessary to its utopian imagination - the Queen of Sheba, Priest John. To abolish Mallarmé’s roll of the dice in his poem to des Esseintes: "Que ce pays n'exista pas" (should this country cease to exist)? Even before the 19th century, there has been a sort of yearning for a union between political action and artistic creation. Support/Surface, in its "Tel quel relationship” with Maoism, was modelled on the Surrealist movement led by Breton, who dreamed himself as the General Secretary of a totalitarian party. In 1972, Daniel Dezeuze was fully aware that what he referred to as an inflation of the “Tel Quel thinking” - promulgated by Philippe Sollers and André Breton - was intended to give a foundation of beliefs establishing an origin from which to recreate a past that would bring about the completion of History. The writing of H and Paradis derived from the absolute prefaced by Dante, Joyce and Pound. A New World could only come about through renewing language, stopping the clocks, starting a new calendar and breaking with the past.

 Marc Devade did not reject Support/Surface. He agreed to an alliance that served him well and served to establish the reputation of the "group" and the Supports/Surfaces era. In the Tel Quel circles, he was the one addressing artistic and pictorial questions alongside Marcelin Pleynet. Such alliance was also justified by the fact that, following the example of several American artists, those who united under the banner of Supports/Surfaces proclaimed their revaluation of the medium (Greenberg), and the apparent autonomy of the painting "brought back to its specific characteristics: two-dimensionality, flat surface, shape of the medium, properties of the pigment, color [...] in other words, the end of all representation". For Marc Devade, painting was more than a craft and much more than a philosophy. 

But this was not enough, even if Marc Devade produced “abstract”, geometric, resolutely minimalist and very concrete works, devoid of all encouragement to “poetic effusion” and “metaphysical meditation”, as shown at the inaugural exhibition at the ARC. These works seemed to exclude all phenomenological end. They appeared as closed systems of forms arranged according to norms of harmonious composition. It is interesting to note that, in the deliberately simplistic description they provided in 1970, Saytour and Viallat saw them as doors and windows, thus framing them in Matissean paradigms. Devade strongly opposed this disappointing ekphrasis, and rightly so. But his first ink paintings from 1972 – and more recently, his almost figurative works from 1978- clearly evoke doors and windows enclosing or partially framing the blank - empty?- space of the canvas. Viallat perceived a depth in these works. Precisely the depth that Greenberg attributed to Monet. In his essay, Devade stated that this "depth" fortunately rendered obsolete "the progressive flattening of the pictorial structure" as "Greenberg conceived it". It was by replacing - more radically than he had done between 1965 and 1967- oil paint by ink, in works on paper that were sometimes expressively lyrical and tachist in the style of Michaux and Pollock, that Devade saturated color to a point that freed it from all censorship related to "the question of sexuality and the instinctual foundations of differentiated genital pleasure not centered around a fetishized reproductive phallic object". Among others, following in Matisse's footsteps, Claude Viallat has underlined the sensuality of color, recognizing its seductive and pleasurable dimension, as claimed by the Rubenists as early as the 17th-century, during the argument reported by Roger de Piles. In the 20th-century, Lhote, whose pedagogical mania undeniably influenced the artists of that generation, valued the "spiritual language" of Cubism more than the "sensual -color- language" of the Impressionists, although at the time of the Liberation, he celebrated the colorful exultation of young French painting. The French passion for Matisse in the 1960s and 1970s can be seen as an escape from the rigor of Cubism and a repudiation of the stern treatises of André Lhote. This shift became decisive after the publication of Marcelin Pleynet's “evangelical” book in 1971, celebrating Matisse and his “orgasmic” color cleverly intertwined with psychoanalysis, and entitled L'enseignement de la peinture (Teaching painting) - a nod to André Lhote and to the practical manual style of his treatises. In addition, Marcelin Pleynet was also highly critical of the survival of the cubist grid in the work of Olivier Debré for example. In Devade's work, this rejection became evident from 1972 onwards, but even more so in a stunning series of works from 1973. Ink made it easier. As it permeates the fabric - the text - of the canvas, it creates subtle flat tints with vibrations of hues on the canvas grain, inspired by the atmospheric landscape paintings and the ink washes of the ancient Chinese tradition, modernized and brought to their final point, Western modernist avant-garde. 

The exhibition features a stunning series of these “paintings” from 1973 and 1975, mostly on canvas and in square formats - 200 × 200 cm divided into three irregular horizontal stripes or, more symmetrically, vertical stripes. In these works, there is a kind of parallelism, of mirror effect - not quite a mise en abyme - between modern American painting and ancient Chinese painting. The effect of such works on the viewer is striking, leading to a questioning that goes well beyond the appeal provoked by a mere beautiful painting. I am trying to say that visual satisfaction is not enough, and that the painting only “works” if the theory inseparable from the form it underpins is understood and, in a way, validated as a truth that transcends the form as well as the experience of those who produce and receive it. We could be tempted by a comparative approach, but it is bound to disappoint. The work’s horizontal divide alludes to Mark Rothko, and the vertical one to Barnett Newman. But formally, it doesn't work. There is no emotional outpouring in the manner of Rothko. No exaltation to heroic sublimation in the manner of Newman. Devade looks neither for tears nor for a slightly Nietzschean tragic suspense. He looks for the dialectic of physical delight and mental jolt. In this sense, he truly embodies the painter-theorist that Camille Saint-Jacques so aptly described. The fact remains, and his 1978 drawings confirm it, that the white stripe has nothing to do with a formalist concern to alternate and punctuate the canvas space.  If we dared, we could intentionally misquote Starobinski's statement about Rousseau and see it as a white and ecstatic incoming or calling light opening a passageway. The enigma of this white stripe might bring us back to the white lights of Fra Angelico and Piero. But how far can we go in a forever-disappointing anachronism: an allegory of the end of history? Of history past and annulled?

All passageways presented as ruptures hold an enigmatic power. This is not “the Open” in the sense of Hölderlin, Novalis, Rilke, Frobenius or Maldiney. Yet, in one of his essays, Maldiney gave us the sense that it could only come about with the crumbling of History, a history that can neither repeat itself nor stutter. In this way, although it is consubstantially linked to his experience and life, Marc Devade's painting fulfils the hopes of dialectical materialism: a reverie turned towards an East that brought those who really took it on to rediscover Europe's "age-old parapets" and the black water of its "black cold pool". In 1975, this enigmatic blank space filled up and in, squeezed into the pictorial space, sharply delineated at its center and edges by an H-shaped structure allegorizing the title of Philippe Sollers's book – a mythical rather than forgotten novel (see the Pile face website) - a prelude to Paradis. This book was published in 1969. Devade returned to it, after completing his Chinese adventure. The H-shaped structure unfolds in diptychs with two overlapping parts. The result is a horizontal line and a -white- blank line? Neither a laceration, nor a gestural mark or a cut. The line requires no stitching. Its horizontality ignores the verticality of Newman's compositions. But it is flanked at the top and bottom by two painted stripes splitting the work as if to prevent a reunion. It suggests the possibility of a folding and unfolding: the opening and closing of a book, the turning of a page? In painting, the H-shaped structure forces to reverse the orientation inherent to any book, as if to remind us of the near illegibility of H, where words, words, words are crammed together without punctuation in a process reminiscent of the surrealist automatic writing, in a more compact way than in Arman’s accumulation. We might suggest that once declared, chanted and punctuated, meanings resurface. 

These two series, like the final works I will not here try to comment, may seem like a crystallization of Western art, which, in literature, was structured by Dante, Joyce, Pound and Sollers, whose works were free from all ideological submission. Like the poet, the painter walks on a tightrope, surrounded by white immateriality, above the void or the volcano, unburdened by politics. He stands in front of the world and even of his work: "al mezzo del cammin.” 

In between the work and the viewer, monochrome always offers a simple formalist solution to support what Marc Devade intended to charge it with: the monochrome. In other words, a wall offered both as an obstacle or, if color is modulated, a depth – alluding to a burying - hoped for as the promise of an opening. In both cases, "meanings are made and unmade " (Soulages) or simply slide on the medium. Thrown by the viewer and boomeranged back in a necessarily dialectical movement? The compartmentalization of the canvas into oblong rectangles is not a "grid", but merely a detour away from the monochromatic affects and the theoretical effects of its history. As if to get rid of the enveloping illusion maintained even by Newman. A reproduction of Cathedra shows two viewers standing very close to each other, unable to see the whole canvas from their viewpoint. One step further for one, two for the other, and the obstacle will be overcome. What will ensue? Will they walk in color? The distancing effect of pictorially materialized compartmentalization rejects all point of view and distance “ordering” an idealistic spatial hierarchy: that of Alberti's - or even Piero's? - perspectiva artificialis, perhaps not that of Uccello, which was thoroughly discussed in Peinture. Cahiers théoriques. In this distance, the viewer can think of a physical, real space, through the interplay of the living relationship between his body and knowledge. This reinforces the power of painting, the much talked about undefinable “painting”, which is nothing more than an enigmatic premise. Like God? As with Barnett Newman, horizontal and vertical lines fray and unravel, escaping geometric ideality as they are pictorially objectified. In later works in three parts, almost deliberately a triptych altarpiece, the sharp lines delimiting the compartments on the side panels, as if to opacify the surface, or rather to wall it off, preventing the possibility of crossing it, seem clumsily incised into the pictorial material. The central part of the triptych which physically separates the panels, consists of a narrow monochromatic stripe, ostensibly vertical. It is sharply cut down the middle by a slightly undulating line. This stripe forces the viewer to stand back, as if “allegorizing” a physical, real space of intervention. Two large canvases apparently seek to establish an order, between two panels where color is scattered, spread, shattered, as if after an implosion, giving way to a chaos the vertical stripe aims to order. It is tempting to see these works as unexpected and corrective clarifications of Barnett Newman’s key work: Onement I. But how can we fail to recall here that one of the sharp weapons of the working class and revolutionaries is one of Mao Zedong’s theses: "All things invariably divide in two.” This "law of the inherent contradiction of things and phenomena, or law of the union of opposites, is the fundamental law of materialist dialectics". 

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The intentions of Marc Devade's painting - in the sense Michael Baxandall gave to this term- were, in a way, represented and figured, like an emblem, literally, by a sign demonstrating what its intellectual functioning should be in Western art, as in an impresa. In 1969, at the center of an unstretched canvas fixed at the top and bottom to a cylindrical wooden stick, Marc Devade transposed and westernized the Chinese character and ideogram hua, which means “Painting”, into a logogram made of wide black stripes - a square enclosing the intersection of two lines running from one edge of the square to the other in its center. This canvas was not to be folded but rolled in and out like a kakemono. The edges were marked with discontinuous black stripes, as if not to frame the canvas. But there was no intention to fuse two cultures into a symbolic form materializing a revisionist "merging of two into one". It was the emblem of a revolutionary manifesto calling for the revolutionary transformation of Western modern art. Which is why the intrinsic motto of this impresa may well be: "Everything invariably divides in two". 

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And yet in his latest paintings, and perhaps ever since the "peregrinating" travels and closely monitored tribulations of the "Tel Quel artists” in China, there has been something like a sensible crack in the incisiveness of these frail and discontinuous lines, as if it was impossible to follow the ideological straightness of a solid line. When the political weakens, the reassuring sacred and/or religious returns to art. Here, we need to go back to this excerpt from "Théorie ou les figures de la peinture", published in 1977 in issue 12 of Peinture. Cahiers théoriques as well as in Camille Saint-Jacques, "Marc Devade peintre théoricien" (Archives d'art contemporain n. 2, Lettres modernes, Paris, 1986). When presenting the works, Camille Saint-Jacques insisted that the "chromatic gesture" took precedence over "discourse as a structuring element of practice" - a challenge to theoretical primacy? The author added that painting seemed to "fill the space of possible meanings like a real biography". A chapter Louis Cane closed with his "return to religious iconography": 

"Far from the current reductionism of so-called non-figurative (?), abstract (? ), analytic, or other, painting (in a word: formalist, either in the post-expressionist or post-minimalist form), we can see that considering the role of the subject in this practice is quite different from reintroducing (expressionist) subjectivity against a supposedly (reductionist or minimalist) anonymity. But the only chance of giving back to painting its symbolic form, which has been exhausted ever since religion, having lost all meaning and unanalyzed, has come back in art, as a return of the repressed. Art, a substitute for religion as a mediator between enjoyment, institutions and the law, insofar as it brings into play the same drives as religion, requires a long analytical process that we have outlined here and elsewhere.  In this process, psychoanalysis, by transforming the discourse on painting, by establishing a different relation to its process and analyzing the relation itself (religion), is the main stake in a practice excluding reductionism and archaism. We are only at the beginnings of a new complexity trying to figure itself out, practically, without myth, in a different discourse. The dissolution of the (religious) fetish and its embodiment as a painted image represents the long march of the endless knowledge of analysis towards the unthinkable, with no object in the horizon ».

Bernard Ceysson

Ceysson & Bénétière