Discover the contemporary work of claude chamartin

He no longer remembers exactly how long he has been spreading color, not because of a possible partial loss of memory, but because as far back as his memories go, he already had a taste for colored surfaces... Chamartin, however, quickly tried a few forays into the "non-figurative" but did not yet dare to steer his work in this direction, which he considered too demanding and full of pitfalls... However, he felt his greatest emotions in front of so-called "abstract" works... However, he has been gradually directing his work towards the non-figurative for over twenty years, hoping one day to find his legitimacy there...

Talented guides admired such as Rothko, de Staël, Motherwell, Vieira da Silva, Bram Bogart, Tapiès, Bacon and many others make him want to continue on the road even if the pitfalls are numerous and sometimes discouraging...!

A time-consuming career in the industryfor many yearslimits hiscreative ardor and then finally comes the time when the latter is exclusively dedicated to the artistic approach.

In the workshop, a musical working atmosphere according to the mood of the moment oscillates between baroque music, electronic melodies, soul and rhythm and blues fills the place, like an immutable ritual.

The mass can then begin... This is the moment of choosing the shades and nuances, deliberately limited to two or three, (at least initially), which will guide the work of the hours and/or days, or even weeks to come (often the work is left and resumed some time later)... However, if it does not conform to the project in preparation or possibly usable later), nothing will see the light of day and the outcome will be fatal for the work carried out.

A few words that touched him, thrown out at random:

-Works organized like creative drafts, as if the potential creator had started over again several times, as if death had to precede life, as if time owed nothing to time.

-Isolated fragments in a whole that is still searching for its truth. A shortcut where we are all involved, not being there would inevitably be getting lost.

- Hands clasped and eyes glued, they look inside each other, convinced that they are, to discover there an "other", better.

- Spreading themselves still wet and bloody on a painful belly that time without tenderness wanted to be temporary.

- Chamartin finds during his exhausting travels the fears and desires of the first cry.

- Expectations like precious stones that beat inside and that nothing and no one comes to disturb, alas.

- There is urgency and impatience in Chamartin's achievements, as if time threatened to run out, sooner than expected...

A few thoughts on the imperative need to continue...!

- It takes a lot of naivety and pathological stubbornness to consider a path where others, better prepared and more talented, have had to to resolve to abandonment...

- Fatigue and disenchantment are the most faithful "engines" of the pursuit of a creative approach. Happiness cannot be part of it...!

- He is very admiring of those who succeed in "unfolding" their work, encumbered by a loving family...

- It seems to him that today he has more demands with his work and much more indulgence with that of his friends... No doubt the benevolence of age...! Life is well made, it is the same for them, without a doubt...

He is grateful for those who insistently advised him to stop painting because his skills seemed so poor and limited... Thanks to them, he worked even harder to perhaps one day catch them in the sentimental nets of his work... He sometimes surprises himself hearing them flatter his work... It is a possibility that amuses him...

They are still legion (editor's note...!), this guarantees him, again, a very long period of hard work and serene humility...!

Time passes and the urgency to propose "to see" becomes more insistent, not for the faint glimmers of small successes of esteem, known and useless, but to requalify a long journey towards the obvious, the vital force of color cannot remain a solitary pleasure of the workshop... The latter remains of course essential and even growing, but sharing it seems to give him new energy. It is not about teaching a practice or some visual sleight of hand due to the seniority of a mastered gesture, but about slipping into another pupil to grasp another way of looking and transmitting without betraying... A bit like taking the other's hand and letting yourself be guided at their pace and the desires that drive them. The way to still consider a possible continuation of the adventure...

He is usually happy when he stops a work session, the next day is more censorious... The sorting is done and few survive his criticism... There are tomorrows that are not cheerful, so he gets back to work and tells himself that he will find many complicit colors to charm the "man of tomorrow" so uncompromising, and rightly so...!

He paints like others play to preserve the mystery of the joys of childhood, simple and violent. He calls himself: "dream flayer", to ensure the tumult under the skins he meets...

"To slip into the gaze of the other to share his childhood emotion..."    C.C.

Non-figurative painting -

Chamartin, Painting the experience of time

Chamartin's work reminds me of a piece of Baroque music: every time you listen to it again, you discover more nuances and new tonalities... As if each gaze traveled differently across the painted surface, as if another invitation allowed you another approach...
If Chamartin's painting can be described as abstract (non-figurative would be more appropriate, as it is so full of vital energy), it also reveals itself in turn to be mineral, climatic, skeletal or epidermal. It is indeed through plastic work on the skin that the artist has developed this aesthetic of dripping and trace that is his own. From scars to marks left by caresses and scratches, whether those of a body or those of time, the painter has thus endeavored to account for the epidermis as a surface for impregnating experience, work that he continues today in more mineral compositions where the exteriority of the physical world and the interiority of the painter are combined.
For several years, in light of this interpretation, Chamartin's abstract paintings can then be understood as interior landscapes. Unless they are the expression of a universal nature. In his geological forms that we would find in the trails of sediment on rocks or in certain fossilizations of corals, the artist thus seems to show their mental and spiritual equivalence. Inlays of tubular motifs and chromatic flows populate the artist's latest compositions and seem to tell the story of the formation of the world. The pictorial time of these trails or bursts of paint as of these forms whose imprint the paper seems to have preserved thus joins that of the biological and the mineral. As in nature, each work combines creative impulse and autonomous movement of a material in perpetual expansion.
It therefore seems that time is at the heart of Chamartin's work. That of painting of course, but also that of the man he gives to see with his skins and the skulls of the series Family Portraits, like the one at work in nature. A work that also invites us to take the time for a contemplation that, beyond of the visual experience, becomes habitation and impregnation.

Bertrand Naivin (art critic) - September 2022