menteur en scène

“I use painting to talk about painting.” Gauthier Hubert

What if the entirety of Gauthier Hubert’s work was nothing but decoys and false pretense? Of course, the extreme rectitude and meticulousness of his painterly style and language, as well as the astonishing precision and accuracy of the situations and figures he insists on depicting, suggest, conversely, his immoderate, almost obsessive passion for description and verisimilitude. The titles of his works, particularly studied and detailed, prove this: from Portrait d’un homme n’ayant ni queue ni tête (Portrait of a man with neither head nor tail) to Un grand homme avec une petite tête, sans chemise, sans pantalon, devant une table lustrée (A tall man with a small head, no shirt, no pants, in front of a glossy table) to Un homme tentant de glisser une soucoupe sous une pile de tasses et sous-casses en alternance afin de représenter une colonne vertébrale (A man attempting to slide a saucer under a stack of cups and saucers to represent a spine). Like perfect “headers,” each of them, most often thought out and written with the utmost care even before the production of the corresponding painting, possesses a genuine programmatic and protocol value. For, beyond the demands of composition and chromatic balance, every element announced in the title is strictly carried out with the same degree of significance and the same scrupulous respect, like a moral contract with the viewer as with the model, whether the latter is real or fictional, historical or contemporary, or even close or distant to the artist. Moreover, it is sometimes inscribed in handwritten letters on the canvas itself, and other complementary sentences may be affixed, confronted, and/or superimposed. Hence the initial impression of a painting with a rebus or enigma.

Nevertheless, what’s revealed and released here is more of the order of the senseless or the unspeakable than of a simple mystery to be deciphered, or a symbolism to be decrypted. Indeed, the more an undeniable uprightness is at work, the more an improbable awkwardness emerges, as if the protagonists of his paintings were “wrong-headed” as much as clumsy. Similarly, the easier everything seems, the more unease overflows and invades the canvas, and a certain “uneasiness” seems to tense the artist’s brush, however dexterous and fine it may be. Hence, no doubt, the title he chose for his first exhibition at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève: “menteur en scène” (a play on “metteur en scene,” with “menteur” meaning “liar”). We might add the nagging feeling that “meaning lies.”

For Hubert, the existence of everything is not where we look for it: it only exists on the surface of a canvas seen as a sensitive epidermis where interiority emerges and exteriority is recorded. In a way, everything here functions like photographic or cinematographic film, impregnated at the same moment with feelings and resentments, sensations and repulsions, the intimate and the extimate of each individual. And the almost transparent treatment of the skin, typical of the artist’s pictorial language, literally underlines and highlights this. It becomes a veritable material body, where skin tones act, react, and interact. Blood vessels and internal emotions crisscross the skin, marking it with shades of pink, violet, and blue, while the intensity of external events either inflames it or sets it ablaze, depending on their vehemence.

Didn’t Leonardo da Vinci, in his “Treatise on Painting,” profess, “The secret of the art of drawing is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line, which is, so to speak, its generating axis, is directed throughout its whole extent, like one main wave which spreads out in little surface waves”? Here, the wave is to the soul; and the net a ground swell that, like the venom of a flexuous sea serpent concealed between successive glazes, contaminates the very nature and texture of the people depicted. So “those” we have to see are merely painted beings, characters for the painter. And yet, paradoxically, as flesh and blood, they can only “be,” can only “exist” “in,” “by,” and “through” this sublime, undisguised act of painting that Hubert tirelessly pursues. And, because of its power and freedom, these beings have never been so full and whole, alive and vibrant, disturbing and trembling, grave and grotesque, albeit almost naked and defenseless, as in this exhibition.