Patrice Pantin
Etymology of Paint
Does Patrice Pantin pine for paint, just as mountain-dwellers or Bretons get homesick? After draining his bitter glass, he scrapes not the barrel but the canvas, in the same way that a trawler scrapes the sea-bed, leaving ephemeral, incredible tracks in its wake... These distinctive tracks reflect a physical struggle with his material. Pantin grapples with the canvas (one of the four treasures of ancient Chinese painting: open sesame!) as if he wants to hurt the paint? Fighting the canvas tooth and nail as if he wants to skin it alive, almost at daggers drawn (not least because he paints with a cutter). The uncovered veins, the sinews and enigmatic trophies of the war that result from this canvas écorché, are pinned with mummy-like vertical strips, from whose ends Pantin strives to extract the essence: in the beginning was the thread of linen, or hemp... And, etymologically, that's what line, a linen cord, actually is (while we're on the subject, don't forget that paint comes from the Latin pingere, which in turn derives from the ancient Greek pixel, which has several meanings, ranging from «undulating and diverse» to «covered with colours» and «embroidered»). So here we have the strips of cloth, crucified and torn apart by the handful of threads that prolong them and hold them in thin air, displayed an inch or two from the wall upon which falls their cross-shaped shadow. We could even talk about lengths of thread and think of spinning a metaphor, but we are not dealing in metaphors here, we are dealing with the crucial question of the here and now, with a shadow, sometimes able to drain the colour from the thread, of more consequence than presence, reverberating like the plucked string of a sitar. Just what is shown on the strips of canvas, if not a shadow, or a pregnant silence, an impression of a thread is de-picted by a subtle artefact, and this absent thread displays the ecceity of a drawn line. By exploiting the original relationship between thread and line, these works on canvas mean the thread's hardness and the line's suppleness are thrown in at the deep end, providing if not the key, at least a key to the large series on paper.
The white or grey grounds are invaded by lines in greater or lesser profusion. Some lines are vermiculated, like twisting morning-glory or graffiti climbing the walls of the Aventine (the grey silk-screen grounds underline this confrontation with the parietal art of the prisoner scratching the days in his cave); or pages from a chiromancy manual for calloused hands, or signatures of the treaties of the Indian wars; or a dressmaker's cast-offs, used by birds to build their nests, like Mondrian starting from bare branches rooted in the cold winter air; or like slender figures in a crazy dance with icy, artistically skated arabesques; or the erratic, cabbalistic ideograms of sandworms on their way to the sea. Other lines are reticulated, as if they have escaped from Piranese's prisons; they are like labyrinths or the criss-cross street-plans of 19th century American cities (the grid on the hill), or giant scores of contemporary music, with rests, stridencies and silences...
We again see the complex approach of this Studio Stakhanovist. Large format (1.4 x 2m) sheets of 400g art paper are coated in transparent adhesive (like Lucretia's veil in Cranach's painting that Pantin much admires). For days on end, with the stubborn meticulousness of a man plotting a crime, Pantin incises the paper through the gauze to give this stage of his work in progress the look of a «light breeze on the water in Roscoff harbour» or «the iridescence of Mysore silk.» Like contours on a giant battle-map at HQ, or the slow translation of isobars before the meteor explodes: one day Pantin, armed with the broad strokes of a brush invariably soaked in black, red or blue, smothers this prepared surface with paint that, blindly following his random gestures, rushes into the incised trenches. At the very moment the work comes irremediably to life (irremediably like, for instance, the single brushstroke of Shi Tao's Zhu Ruoji), Pantin removes the adhesive film, strip by strip, leaving on the paper lines that are canals that turn into vessels, ships of the line! Veins of red blood, veins of blue blood, shallow, slandered streams of death: the colours intermingle in the linear riverbed, like the diastole and systole of an estuary. Pantin loves lines that change colour as they progress and all that this drains. He plunges his style into the heart of the paint as if into the «heart of the Unknown,» and whatever he catches in his nets of paint is not dead but, as Harvey would have it, part of the circulation. Net: what flows out, and what retains. We are back to Ariadne's thread and the wheel has come full circle when we see that a line painted like this can provide a perfect trompe-l'oeil illusion of a thread, Pantin's philosophical osmosis that goes from canvas to paper, then back to canvas, to the canvas sails of epic voyages; to the veil we need to penetrate. And this painterly introspection leads to what we could call Free Prefiguration (Préfiguration Libre).
Like Hantaï's folds, Pantin's grooves ooze restraint. To Pantin, like Mallarmé, Thelonious Monk or Twombly, White matters.... There is something Bressonian about this painting, showing less to say more, subtracting and abstracting in outsize understatement. Looking is an act of silence; the lines should be scanned like the horizon (yes, there is something meteorological about this approach). Entrenched in his linear trenches, Pantin wages a silent, stubborn, solitary war with the resilience of a Zen monk, a Morandi, or a Toroni, ploughing his furrow, pursuing his quest, cutting through appearances to reach beneath the support, beneath the surface: the sap beneath the bark, dripping with colour... Looking, like keeping silent, can be something profound. If we attempt, as we are trying to do here, all-too- hurriedly (there is such a yarn to spin!), to untangle the skein of this painting we deem «of noble fibre,» we cannot fail to be struck by the coherence of its underlying network: the artist has drawn his dagger, weaving a Florentine web that extends from Penelope's unstitched canvas to the single string of trumpet marines, not strung out in a line but in a dotted raindrop curtain, the better to listen to the looking...
The recent series of smaller works heralds the onset of new colours in Pantin's paintings, including golden yellow lines that irresistibly evoke Isolde's blonde locks, at the mere sight of which, and for the thought of which, Tristram was dispatched by Mark, and help reply to our initial question: it is not nostalgia at work here, but desire. Which sometimes takes short-cuts. So we cross the power line, switch off, then turn it on again.
Pierre-Alain Tilliette