"Paysages de conjecture" : Interview with Frédéric Werst

Roy Forget, "Will Scheidmann," août 2017, huile sur toile, 54 x 73 cm

FW: To begin with, tell us about your exhibition at the Duplex "Paysages de conjectures?"

RF: "Landscapes of conjecture," the title itself comes from Pessoa.  In Erostrate, he theorizes that there is a "univeral" language in all the arts except for literature, where one is confronted by the problem of tongues and dialects, their multiplicity, and thus any speculation of fame and importance is a "paysage de conjecture."

I found this title quite pertinent to the paintings that I have been working on since January of this year.  I had to move studios in the late Autumn of last year and working in a new situation forced a certain change.  For one, the space where I currently work has North light, which in fact changes one's outlook enormously.  More importantly, the change in situation forced me to think differently.  The idea of re-working landscape ideas in the studio is not a new one, but since the move, I have let go of primordial elements I had used in the past to construct my paintings, and allow the idea of a landscape to assume the primal role.

FW: Could you be more specific as to these past "primordial elements?"

RF: Ever since I began painting seriously, and even before, at the age of 15 or so, I had been immersed in the pursuit of painting the human body.  I think that is the primordial element of my pictorial construction up until the current series.

FW: In the current paintings, even though there is a scarcity of the human figure, there is no lack of other figures -- birds, trees, airplanes, architecture . . .

RF: Correct, but what I am getting at is that in the past, the paintings were constructed with the human figure in mind, where as now, even if a human figure is present, it is subsumed within the process of the landscape.

FW:  What led to this change?

RF:  A number of things.  First, as I mentioned, moving studios, and then, perhaps more directly pertinent to the question, I had been working on a series of small format figure paintings of bodies, mainly male nudes, in movement, since 2012.  The first thing I did after moving studios was to finish the last pieces of this series of work.  And I think that the closure of the series led me to want to think of other things, move on to other ideas.

FW:  What ideas?

RF: Well, it is not one new idea or one new direction.  What happened was that, as usual, when I feel disturbed or when I am in some sort of artistic impasse, I search in literature.  In my case, my "go to" for many years now has been Marcel Proust.  I have somehow always found open roads in his text.  This past winter, I re-read Le Temps retrouvé.  The narrator, after more than 6 and a half volumes of wandering through life and basically being what a modern American would call "a dilettante," had just found his calling when he tripped over a cobblestone at the Hôtel de Guermantes.  During the minutes following this moment, he describes himself as a painter, who had been climbing a hill, and had just discovered through the veil of rocks and tree branches in front of him, a lake.  While he takes out his paints and brushes to start on his landscape, he realizes that the sun is setting and that there will soon be no light to work, and the night to come would be the night that will see no daylight . . .

FW: So this became your painting "Paysage post-exotique?"

Roy Forget, "Paysage post-exotique," 2017, Oil on wood panel, 50 x 100 cm

RF:  Yes, but the title is sort of an afterthought, I had started reading Antoine Volodine by the time the painting was finished, and I was enamored with his writing, of course, but also with this word "post-exotique."

FW:  And Volodine's "Post-exotisme" to you is a passing fancy or is there some other element that you are trying to delineate?

RF: Not a passing fancy but more an à propos point of departure.  Volodine's post-exotisme is his own fictional literary movement, and in his different novels, they take on different characteristics.  In Ecrivains, he invented a writer, Linda Woo, who pronounces that post-exotic literature is the last useless and imaginary witness, written by the weary, or by the dead, for the dead.  For decades now, art critics have pronounced the death of painting as a matter of fact, and Volodine's words seemed very à propos when one thinks about the fact that I make oil paintings, and even more so, landscape paintings in oil.  So I took Linda Woo's pronouncement and applied it to painting, and to my work;  I may very well be a post-exotic painter.

FW: Volodine's work appears to have inspired a number of different pieces in the series, at least their titles, that is to be shown at the Duplex in September.  It appears to me, given the imagery that he describes in his novels, there is a very loose, if any, association with the imagery of your paintings, like "Oudgoul," which is the name of one of the characters in his novel Terminus radieux.

Roy Forget, "Oudgoul," 2017, Oil on linen, 73 x 100 cm

RF:  The landscapes in the series are not illustrations of Volodine's literary spaces.  In Terminus radieux, the imagery of Volodine is a mixture of endless forests of the Taiga, or the Siberian steppes.  In "Paysages de conjecture," there are three paintings named after three characters of the novel: Solovieï, Kronauer, and Oudgoul (she is actually "la mémé Oudgoul" in the novel).  The three characters elicited different responses from me.  Solovieï is this dark sadistic, deceitful shaman who is like a semi-deity, able to use black magic to create and perpetuate a purgatorial world for the dead.  Kronauer is a fallen soldier of the second Soviet Union and he is and perhaps had always been, a wanderer, alone, and quite clueless, wandering from forest to steppe to this sort of endless oblivion in search of something that is in fact nothing at all.  And Oudgoul is immortal, she ages but does not die because her body is ironically preserved by nuclear irradiation.  At the end of the novel, she chooses to disappear by throwing herself into the nuclear furnace that she had spent centuries feeding irradiated nuclear waste to.  In the paintings, I wanted to paint about each one of these individuals, not as a traditional portrait, but more as an evocation.

FW:  Your pre-occupation seems to be an inward turning one, your practice does not directly engage current events nor do you posit any posture of contemporaneity . . .

RF: Your question somehow encompasses again the idea that painting is dead, or not "contemporary."  In France, I am often surprised by the very delineated and defined practice of "Contemporary Art." It is a defined style, one where situational aesthetics is the primary engagement and where the practice, if one is to be taken seriously, necessarily needs to be something that falls between Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Pareno, or at least, Duchamp. . . .

Roy Forget, "Linda Woo," juillet 2017, huile sur toile, 54 x 73 cm

FW: Polemics aside, I was actually more precisely wanting to know if there are any elements that is non-literary in your paintings.  Is there anything outside of your reading that engages your practice?

RF: Painting landscapes is an engagement with everything that surrounds us -- the particular tints of light in the evening just before a storm, the different cloud formations that passes above one's head, how weeds and wild flowers are randomly altering an otherwise arboreal space.  When I was in art school, I had a particular professor who had a chip on his shoulder against traditional landscape painting.  I had spent a summer drawing gravestones in a cemetery as they, along with the cypress trees and the manicured lawns in this particular cemetery in Southwestern Michigan, reminded me of Cézanne's landscapes of Aix-en-Provence. He basically told me that it was impossible for any serious contemporary artist to paint landscapes for it is a lie to pretend that land and landscape are not undergoing the environmental disasters that is looming on Earth.  He said that the only landscape one could conceive of seriously would be akin to a practice where one would stain canvas in the polluted waters of post-oil-spill-somewhere (I do not remember the artist's name) . . .

FW: The aesthetization of a contemporary event, one wonders if that in itself is not deeply problematic.  As such, what is your current rapport with this type of puritanical conception of art, which for someone from France, is admirable in its exclusionary Greenbergian purity but also very American in its black and white moral probity.

RF:  It has taken many years for me to "come out" and do landscape paintings.  I was a staff artist at the Vermont Studio Center and I remember John Walker taking us out into the woods of Northern Vermont to paint landscapes.  Besides the large constructed abstract paintings he is known for, he was also an avid traditional landscape painter.  I remember seeing in his studio, while he was in Johnson, Vermont, literally dozens of paintings of woods and waterfalls and rock formations.  They were wonderful paintings but I do not think he ever showed those paintings.  I had to move here to France to get the headspace I needed to engage in painting out of doors.  I had, of course, done some paintings out of doors during my two years spent in Bloomington, Indiana, but had not, since finishing art school,  done any plein-air paintings until I moved here in 2009.

FW: You have been in France for close to eight years now.  At this point in your life, would you call yourself still an American, or French?

RF: I really am neither American, nor French, or anything.  I am a third-world immigrant to the West.  It is difficult to pinpoint my roots exactly as my parents were immigrants, and I presume my grandparents were also immigrants.  We are of Chinese ancestry but the roots are in the British colony of Malaya; my father is from Singapore and my mother grew up on the island of Penang, in Malaysia.  I spent the first years of my life in Vietnam where my parents were working, it was during the war, we left just two weeks before the American soldiers pulled out . . . but being conceived in Vietnam, Indochine as you call it here in France, perhaps my proclivity for all things French comes from that early exposure.

FW: To close, what are your future projects?

RF: I have another solo show coming up in March of 2018, at La Belle Hortense in the Marais.  Putting shows together is akin to following a path in a maze or a dense forest.  One is never sure where one is going nor whether one is going to make it out of the maze.

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Roy Forget, "Solovieï," 2017, Oil on linen, 65 x 100 cm