Homage to André Marfaing

André Marfaing, artiste, native of Toulouse, deceased in 1987, had crossed paths with Olivier Debré and Bengt Lindstrom: all three worked for a time together. This friendship is the starting point for this exhibition, essentially consecrated to Marfaing but articulated around the works produced in common by the three artists in 1974.

“Others say that I paint in black and white. Can’t they see anything else?” wrote André Marfaing. What? if not for this immediate flow of light, immanent and tangible at the same time, so fascinating that it remains impossible to identify, or even define; without place allotted, almost magic, it crosses the pictorial field as if to construct an incisive glare of minerals in the purity of mountain skies.

Undoubtedly it is the result of a continued and mastered energy which, by the gesture and inscription of the first canvases, are finally calmed in the spatial integrity of the later paintings.

“Haven’t you ever (…) tested the feeling of clarity which seems to float, diffuse itself, and realize in part, that it is not an ordinary clarity, that it has a rare quality, a particular gravity? Haven’t you ever tested this kind of uneasiness which one feels when faced with eternity, as if to remain in this space makes one lose the notion of time, as if the years passed without one realizing of it, to believe that the moment one leaves it, one will have suddenly become a hoary old man?” (Tanizaki Junichiro, Praise of the shade, 1933)

Such is also the strength of the works of Marfaing which, from matter to light, conceives a freedom and destiny in the paintings without any reference to itself and its own evolution.

Ultimate flash of a glimpse which plunges into “the silk of silence” (Rilke)

André Marfaing is a non-figurative French painter. For him, his work is not about representing natural reality, but to rid the painting of representative weight, to exceed the tangible in order to materialize the implicit, with a minimum of means.

He worked in oils as well as engravings, using mostly black, in painting that is abstract, ascetic, sometimes close to writing. It possesses a true power.

Its moving luminous contrasts, the remarkable reunion of the black and white causes an explosion in the first glance. Marfaing plays with the black and the white, overlapping across the limits, which it overcomes in a large breath of freedom and purified forms. A black which embraces and allures at the same time, defying the white in a dialogue made of shades and light. His practices of charcoal and of lithography, his love for Romanesque art and its sculptures, have undoubtedly prepared Marfaing to capture the interactions between shade and light, which he applied to his abstract painting. The painting of Marfaing has such intensity, it is adequate in itself, that it almost makes some forget the painter.

The work is the impressive record of a generation which, just after the war, having tempered the aspects of pretenses and accessibilities of figurative painting, took the route of necessity, and assumed the adventure, although audacious, of abstraction.

Marfaing never titled his works, wishing not to influence the viewer, but to leave complete freedom of interpretation: only the dimensions and date are given as reference. He is a pure and honest painter, full of emotion.

Andr é Marfaing crossed paths with Olivier Debr é and Bengt Lindstrom, all three having worked together. This friendship is the starting point for this exhibition, essentially consecrated to Marfaing but articulated around the works produced in common by the three artists in 1974.

BIOGRAPHY

December 11th 1925 (in Toulouse) - March 30th 1987

During the last years of his studies, Andre Marfaing worked in charcoal drawing of antiques in an academy of sculpture in Toulouse, before choosing painting as his means of expression. He finished a Bachelor in law in 1948, before deciding to settle in Paris to focus on painting. He participated in the ‘salon de la jeune peinture’ in 1950, then the ‘salon de Mai’ and at ‘Realités Nouvelles’ where he continued to regularly exhibit his works. His first personal exhibit was in 1958 at the gallery Claude Berbard. It was during this era that he found his basis of plastic language in lyrical abstraction, using energetic gestures.

However, only from the 70s did Marfaing hold exhibitions in his native city, due to the spirit of new galleries: At Home in February 1970 and Protées in October 1972, who organized his personal exhibitions until their closure.

In the beginning of his career, Marfaing is a colorist of figuration. It’s in Paris that he discovers non-figurative art and quickly abandons color and realistic objects to work on the rationality of light and shadow. His work is, for him, freeing oneself from the weight of a subject and to deliver one from the figurative. He works on matter and space, with an alternation between full and empty surfaces, in dimensions that will later drive toward a more fluid substance.

By playing with a white background like a violent back-light, he uses the monochromatic black from which it develops its richness: gray black, black ochre, purple black and bluish black. He paints in impulse, on instinct, and his gestures become more and more controlled: using spatulas or brushes, he begins his paintings with broad black strokes, which he resumes more vigorously in order to balance the masses and to order the “disorder” which rises in him. His painting is spontaneous, resistant and dynamic. Between 1967 and 1969 Marfaing uses severe blows of the brush, which seem organized into a plan, the attacks rise and the brush strikes in all directions. In his canvases from 1970 to 1972, we see more than just contrast between light and shadow, black and white, but that between serenity and excitation, order and disorder. The light regresses and finds a compromise in tones of transparent gray, the forms and rhythms are purified, only the bare essential remains.

Homage to Andre Marfaing