Sap rise

In the family of 16-letter surnames, there are good reasons to memorise the lilting surname of Joël Andrianomearisoa. His current work is entitled Les herbes folles du vieux logis (Wild Grass of the Old Dwelling), which is being exhibited to the public as part of the 2021 Art Season at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

It is a painting without paint. In other words, it is a rectangular 2D work suspended vertically in landscape format, which seems natural given the context in which it is set.  There are colours which at first glance make for an abstract canvas. And that is exactly what it is about.

That is the paradox. A discourse on today's pictorial art is expressed here in materials that differ in all respects from the pasty, creamy or liquid colours that usually settle in patches on palettes.

Joël Andrianomearisoa likes to deploy his poetic universe by working with multiple mediums and materials. The organisers of the Chaumont event underline this in their presentation of the artist. One should expect everything from a jack-of-all-trades whose creations are "often made from textiles, paper, sometimes wood, minerals, or from unexpected objects (mirrors, perfumes, packaging, stamps...) with which he reinvents the magical and provokes emotion".

The ingredients used for the installation Les herbes folles du vieux logis, whatever their actual nature, are in any case halfway between paint and plant. It is a quasi-plant artefact of a painting. A work in which the model, in this case the plants, is directly overhung by its portrait, which delivers an almost digital abstract version. It is as if the painting refuses to integrate the subject into its frame, from which it is itself trying to escape. A crossroads. Exercise in X, as Gainsbourg would have said.

Colour plays a unifying role here. Ochre, yellow, green, brown, black... the palette used takes up, to better blend in, the natural shades of its subject as well as its context. Everything is intermingled. But the peaceful harmony of this chromatic mimesis only enhances the raw and even violent character of the vertical lines forming a wild bas-relief of nylon parallels that compose, like stretched pixels, the cross-hatched traces of a plastic counterfeit of the plant. And they imitate its growth.

The work can then be read as a geometric reorganisation of nature which, seized by art, rebels and contests from within its chalk line. What emerges is a subtle game of off-frame with a very 21st century spirit. This umpteenth dialogue between art and the world is eminently pictorial in nature. By the inaugural trompe-l'oeil when it is discovered. But also by its purpose and the artistic issues in which it is embedded.

To melt into the soul of its subject while overflowing its frame. This is a pretty good definition of the "experience" to which a painting of today should invite us. But which painting of 2021 fulfils it?

There are good reasons to memorise Joël Andrianomearisoa's 16-letter surname.

Illustration : Joël Andrianomearisoa - Les herbes folles du vieux logis - 2021