Ceysson & Bénétière

"Everything’s already started, we just have to continue… All resolutions for the future are imaginary. Keep on doing what you’re doing, just do it better."

- Alain, Propos sur le bonheur (1925)

Having painted for over fifty years without nostalgia, Noël Dolla has been quick to jettison what no longer serves him, moving ever onwards through whatever means necessary. Focusing on a just sliver of his vast output, “Tulle / Dye 1969-2023” will be the French artist’s first major exhibition in New York, featuring a half-century of his work with painted tarlatan.

This open-weave gauze material is most often used in France by commercial artisans to repair walls, where it is glued as a patch to cover cracks in plaster prior to painting. The porosity of the tarlatan fabric itself may be as multifaceted as its uses: a rough and raw building material which can paradoxically also be used as the fluff of a tutu. Dolla has exploited the inherent content, as well as physics, of a host of materials in his long career. In this exhibition, tarlatan is variously folded, dyed, stamped; other times he has draped and rolled the gauze onto and into the architecture of space itself. As a woven fabric, tarlatan exists here as a cypher for canvas, the traditional substrate for painting.

He was one among many in the 1960’s who sought new strategies in painting that were more appropriately attuned to their own radical social engagement seeking a redistribution power. There seemed to be no abiding reason for painting to be just one thing, bound up in a traditional commercialized structure of the distinct stretched canvas hung on a white wall, with a single point of view, a distillation of hegemonic power. Dolla’s use of tarlatan is fully subsumed in the inviting act of extending painting into the everyday but rather than being a polemic, he leans into a playful frisson resulting from working in the valley between high and low, where both artist and viewer can take pleasure in visual phenomena and what can blindly dismissed as decorative. A place to rest a while, recharge, a place where we can wander. A tonal spacial environment of options, all while saying within painting, as such—its elements repacked, its program hacked—like tulle, its power can be both hard and soft. Gently touching the rest of the world, painting can, significantly, still be just one more thing amongst many.

Here is the point of access where the work becomes art rather than stopping at discourse. Dolla’s tarlatans are highways for capillary action. He plunges the entire end of a narrow roll of fabric into cans of washy paint which it willingly sucks up and instead of sitting on the surface, the color becomes ingrained as an integral part of the material. These initial marks are indexically repeated and replicated and distorted as the paint is absorbed through the unseen layers of the rolled-up fabric. These transposed marks, often punctured with three dots, create intentionality while their anonymity maintains enough space for the viewer to retain their autonomy.

And since the fabric itself is so weightless, the gallery wall on which it is swathed, or the floor that the end of the roll sits on—by implication, the material world—becomes painting’s frame. It’s as if the substrate itself has become a living line, an ouroboros ripped from the world and released back into the wild. Dolla’s paintings are not immune from the same physics we viewers are concurrently experiencing. Perhaps we feel a moment of egalitarian attention with the the artist, but never reverence. Through re-orienting the physical world without leaving it, Dolla opens new visual and haptic realities that empower us with possibility. I can’t help but associate this show’s title with the thought that in this life we tool, we die.

Erik Lindman, June 2023

Ceysson & Bénétière
956 Madison Avenue
10021 New York