BEATRICE BALCOU
24 APRIL 2025 - 6 JULY 2025
LA LOGE
I want to focus here on the presentation in the ground floor temple, and more specifically on one work.
There, the space is dedicated to multiple canvases scarcely treated and lit with neutral temperature flood lights.
Unmissable and central in the space lays a large canvas on a wooden platform. At first glance it is entirely blank, except for its left lower corner (if you look at it with the entrance behind you) where there is a blackish mark cut in two by a blank short strip. Above on the other side of the canvas, one very fine row of elongated marks, made of the same black tint, is slightly observable. In the handout text it is mentioned that this layed canvas is a 1/1 imitation of Shining Forth (To George) by Barnett Newman, but only of its restored pieces; a fragmentation of a sort, diluted of all of its original material. In the text they call it segments.
The question of the Theseus Ship comes to mind here; if by replacing one by one every piece of a ship without altering its appearance, does it at one point become another ship or does it remain the original one? If somehow (probably) Shining Forth would decay entirely, bits by bits, over decades and so on, and it would always be restored as it should have looked, will we end with a dupe?
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In a sequence of “Plein Soleil” directed by René Clément; Tom Ripley meticulously re-crafts the passport of the man he killed to steal his identity. In his hotel chamber he projects an enlarged picture of his victim’s passport signature onto the wall mounted with a blank paper. He proceeds by tracing over the victims name and more importantly the gestures of it. After an ellipse, we see the many attempts scattered on to the wall. He ends with two last tries, where we see the speed and confidence he has obtained, completing his endorsement of a new name. He stands proudly along with it.
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Newman's work is intrinsically linked to a standing audience in front of it, near it; needing a verticality in sort; a face à face. A picture showing Newman and a female visitor in front of Cathedra shows this ambivalence clearly. The two vertical stripes on the painting are like their two standing bodies, and the grand monochrome surface acts as an atmosphere they could enter. It seems like they are closer than an arm's length of the painting. From their perspective you would only see the colour spanning to every corner of the eye, totally enveloped in it. I suppose they should be able to see the waving pattern of the canvas.
They're not so far away from how a restorer would look at it.
In the temple room of La Loge, the laid down fabric denatures this bodily interaction that a Newman would have sought - if we consider Balcou’s work as an indirect imitation of Newman’s (micro) gestures (which I feel like it must be an available option).
Instead we gaze downwards and bend over this almost voidish plane. Around Balcou’s work, there are benches placed around, insinuating again the field of restoration. The masonic temple makes it look like a devotional display. I actually don't know if Masons sit somewhere, or on something, during their ceremonies.
There are many pictures of visitors sitting on benches (or standing) in front of, for example, Newman's painting (and generally in front of any abstract paintings). It is now part of it (or always was part of it). An internalised image of the body with abstraction.
On Google Images I found a picture of Newman in his studio in front of an enormous blank canvas - a size similar to that of Cathedra. He stands in front of it with his back raising his left arm with a gesture of presentation to the photographer. It is as if this white plane was going to unravel like a curtain of a theater. Even without a trace of paint, the show is already on, as if the work also exists (already) in a non-painterly phase.
Laid like this, Balcou’s Newman seems erased from its top and down or left and right.
It lies, looking like a body on the examination table. It also lies like those geographic maps where you can encounter some history museums, displaying a region or city with topographic relief. I recently saw one, but there it hung on a wall, which, if you think about landscape and immersion, looked rather counterintuitive. Those paintings by Balcou are not far away from this mapping functionality: indicating the zones that were restored or built upon and delimiting them from remaining authentic structures. One day it must be updated.
The notion of care (heal) is juxtaposed with control (exactitude).