Text about the work of Charlotte Houette, published in the catalog of the 25th edition of the Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize.
Op Op Art
Paintings have always had a dark side. This hidden face contains everything that has been deliberately excluded from the sensitive experience offered to viewers, but that influences them imperceptibly.
Yet today we are living according to the rule of primacy of images, in which the pictorial experience is subordinated to that of its photographic reproduction, and in which the hidden dimension—the part that cannot be abstracted into bits and pixels—is reduced to a metadata that is lost as reproductions multiply. The more ready-made forms of life promoted by social networks are imposed on us, the more this dimension shrinks and withers, becoming the negligeable part of existence. The images we live by do not represent the world, but are the expression of the programme contained in the camera. Painting, in the current conditions, amounts to derailing the logic of reification, by causing something to happen that was not preordained by the programme.
Charlotte Houette’s most recent paintings have pop-up systems at their core, similar to the ones in animated books. Built into the very structure of the painting, they appear through a cut made in the canvas, they have several typologies, each suggesting a different movement or mode of apparition: a sliding panel, enabling a figure to move along a vector; a system of encased strips activated by a sideways motion, causing them to appear or disappear from images in the background; a diaphragm, the same as that of a camera, which opens and closes on spaces situated outside the scene. In pop-up books, these systems make readers the operators of a world that they contribute to animating, depending on a number of predetermined possibilities, a bit like a primitive form of videogame.
However, in Charlotte’s paintings, there are no cardboard flaps, little ties, or serrated disks offered to viewers to activate the mobile parts. Since any possibility of interaction is denied to them, the experience remains suspended between playful and pictorial. The physical encounter with the artwork only constitutes a brief moment in a sequence whose totality escapes the viewers, compromising the simultaneity of the pictorial experience with its photographic reproduction. Ultimately, it is perhaps the painting itself that is playing, exploring all possible combinations options in the chain of image distribution.
“Vision”, explains psychologist Rudolf Arnheim inThe Responsive Eye (1966), Brian De Palma’s documentary on Op Art, “is based on discrimination, on the distinction between things which are different from each other. If you put the human mind in a situation in which distinction is no longer there…” He points to the parallel lines on a Bridget Riley painting, which contract in an undulating movement: “Then the eye jumps the track, you jump from one groove to the other.”
Charlotte uses and abuses this Op Art characteristic, combining vectorial files found in the optical illusions section of a rights-free illustration library. All of this bi-dimensional imagery made of grids, targets, and pictograms is distorted on Photoshop, as though passed through a machine for stretching taffy, before being reproduced on the canvas using stencils and an ultra-matte paint resembling plastic. The colour, which seems to obey a weird chromatic system only producing synaesthetic responses, gives the impression of being separated from its support. It stops being a property of the object to become a thing in itself.
Charlotte models a paranoid space, where 2D forms torn from their original plan, distorted like the “fleeting-improvised-men”1 described by Daniel Paul Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), are sucked towards holes whose presence can only be deduced through the disturbance that they produce in the visual field.
The film Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) is introduced by a scene of conjugal intimacy, in which a couple entwined on a bed—played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike—seem to be delaying the moment of getting up by tacitly allowing themselves a tender moment. The shot is filmed from the man’s point of view. On his chest lies his wife’s head, with only the back of her hair appearing onscreen. As he strokes her hair, he pronounces in voiceover: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers.”2 As though he had inadvertently said these words aloud, the wife turns her head and stares into his eyes—which are simultaneously ours—with an expression foreshadowing the persecutions that she will inflict upon him throughout the film. The character of the man is incapable of imagining the dimensions of his wife that are inaccessible to him, other than through a morbid fantasy in which all of his dark side is illuminated. This denial of interiority is also imposed on him, as evidenced by the fact that he seems unable to stop expressing his own thoughts aloud.
It is against this kind of idolatrous spectator, a term which, according to philosopher Vilém Flusser’s, defines the person who cannot “read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves”3 that Charlotte deploys her retinal sadism. She designs optical toys for them that constantly cause the eye to jump from one instance to the other, successively drawing on its multiple functions: scanning the surface, finding relationships, distinguishing form from content, or the limits of the object. These sequences of contradictory stimulations, like thistles laid on the viewer’s cosy armchair, make the comfort and restfulness of a unified visual experience impossible. But above all, they aim to create conditions for the emergence of new ways of seeing, that do not pre-exist in any programme. By reintegrating the viewer into the influence of the hidden part of the painting, Charlotte ultimately seems to be seeking to reconnect with them.
Painting is the product of elective affinities that an artist maintains with materials, actions, subjects, and people, whether dead or alive. Painting is therefore essentially an act of love. But even before it is expressed, this love is stymied by a dilemma. Must it alter its nature, so that it can be expressed according to the constraints inherent to images? Or, on the contrary, must it remain authentic, even if it means condemning itself to insignificance in today’s economy of the gaze? The dual constraint that is now imposed on the painter recalls the one that tormented the spurned lover described by Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, in the chapter entitled “Dark Glasses”: “To impose upon my passion the mask of discretion […]: this is a strictly heroic value. […] Yet to hide a passion totally […] is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too week, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen […]: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask.”4
1 Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110.
2 David Fincher, Gone Girl, Regency Entreprises and TSG Entertainment, United States, 2014.
3 Vilém Flusser, Towards A Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 83.
4 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 42-43.