interview and interview by Soreya H.Azarmsa, Canal magazine n°4, “Interview”1990, p:18-19.
Philippe Lagrange is a singular watchmaker of images. He methodically dismantles the rhetorical mechanisms like the pieces of a clock that he would adjust to sound, after each hour flown away, after each image passed, the coming race of figures of speech, passing, ironing, canvas after canvas, to age the same History. As if the image had passed the time to play, and that its literality is the narration of the slightest nothing as a trace of the entire painting. Count.
Soraya Azarmsa –
This technique of solid colors that characterizes your painting offers a purity, a sharpness of the image that explains the title of your exhibition: Mise au point. Like the eye of a camera, this focus »> allows us to see clearly! Your rigorous, concise drawing, which tends to reduce the lines to their greatest simplicity, also reflects the need to distance yourself from your subject. You try, as you say, to eliminate “sentimental parasites”. On the other hand, we, viewers, are thus forced to penetrate beyond the primary form…
Philippe Lagrange –
In fact, when they find themselves in front of a painting, people often have an emotional rather than an intellectual approach. This first visual approach is desirable at first, but then it takes effort. There is recognition or not. One does not learn Chinese with affectivity. People should ask themselves the real questions more; often they see the painting and just decide what it means to them. Have we really asked ourselves the essential questions about masterpieces as well known, for example, as the Shepherds of Arcadia, by Nicolas Poussin?
S.A-
Your painting has its own language, its “codes”, its symbolism that you must therefore learn to decipher. You also play a lot with spoken language, which explains the importance given to the titles of the canvases
Ph.L. –
The title is the first clue that orients the viewer.
S.A-
Your painting has sometimes been compared to critical and narrative figuration; you have been called “Adami franc-comtois”… But there is, between Adami and you, the difference that there would be between a sculpture by Arp and by Brancusi. The essence is quite different!
Ph.L.- When you ask yourself a certain type of question, regarding the execution of a canvas, you may find similar solutions. Some problems can only be solved by certain technical means. There is also a period sensibility. But if you really look at my work, you see that it has nothing to do with Adami’s. It is intellectual laziness to put us in the same category! There is a cutting up, a dismantling of forms with Adami that does not exist with me. A psychoanalysis of his system would be interesting. There is also a formal systematic, an internationality of subjects such as philosophy, music, etc., which do not exist in my painting. For him, it is a form of illustration; he appropriates the atmosphere of an era to revisit it. But that doesn’t interest me at all. To draw a parallel with literature, I would say that Adami writes novels, and I write poetry. Just compare a canvas by Adami depicting the philosopher Nietzsche and my interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s Last Days, absent from the canvas. Sometimes, he also shows a wickedness in the drawing and in his relationship with the body, especially female, which is totally foreign to me. Finally, he claims to belong to the great Italian tradition: I am a purely French painter.
S.A-
In fact, your painting is of another order. In a way, it’s conceptual, but with the added know-how… Do you compare your way of working to that of poetry?
Ph.L. –
This is the difference between the narrative and the short expression. When you write a sonnet, you are not writing a novel: there is the difference in duration, in time. If one makes a description, one does not make a metaphor. I have also noticed that when things are very close to me, they are all the more conceptual, as in The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant or Mother Denis, where I still take many more formal risks than for others. canvases.
S.A-
Do you work a lot by associations of ideas?
Ph.L. –
Yes, because they are significant, at least for me, and that is why I demonstrate them.
S.A-
Coming back to the form, I noticed that you generally avoid classical perspective?
Ph.L.-
If I use it, it is to denounce, as in the Last Days of Emmanuel Kant: I restore the image of an illusory phenomenon. In Shadows and Light, perspectives are present, but they are false perspectives, they overlook nothing. For the Mother Denis, I operate a kind of cutting; there are bits of perspective, but it’s not a space that’s close to the viewer, it’s an abstract space.
S. A-
References abound in your work, even borrowings. Obviously, you are a “cultivated” painter: you have “looked a lot, observed, analyzed the history of art in general, archeology, but also everyday life. You have thus developed a reflection on the media means of our society Can you talk about Mother Denis on the theme of which you made ten paintings?
Ph.L.-
One day, I came across an advertising page, very plain, but I found that Mother Denis, despite the mediocrity of the photo, had a formidable presence there. I saw an obvious aesthetic aspect in it, completely out of step with what advertising generally conveys. Faced with the “trap” content of the advertisement, there was a very rich “<< background”: the naturalness was obvious, she was a real laundry woman. Seeing her, one misses the “real grandmother”, with her accent in France, -everyone has an accent-; it is the opposite of modern life, which certainly explains its success. She also represents the woman made for suffering – “You will give birth in pain!” >> -, linked to sin: it is a pieta; I made a “prototype” of it, always the same one found in the ten canvases.
S.A-
Has it become an allegory, a mythical figure that has allowed you to elucidate part of your questions about painting and its means?
Ph.L.-
With regard to the actual execution of the Mère Denis, it is precisely in these canvases that one realizes that my painting is of a conceptual order; the subject itself allows all sorts of formal variations, and therefore formal choices that are significant. First there was a kind of prototype, which is now in the Museum of Dôle. This image, I appropriated it without really realizing its power. As Picasso said: “painting does not necessarily make me do what I want”. So I took up this subject several times, like for the canvas Were Dei, the famous tomb of Mother Denis. The image was too beautiful!, the photo so significant with this reversal of text, this mirror effect that I couldn’t, since it was in a way my subject, let it pass! From this painting, I remade in 1987-88 a series of three canvases on the three primary colors, red, yellow, blue, with a demonstration of both the format and the means.
S.A-
But not with a totally conscious will? Basically, you do, you are led, guided, and then you analyze?
Ph.L.-
Yes, I now see the demonstration. For the three Mother Denis, there was first the choice in relation to the square and the linear meter; I was preoccupied by the choice of the proportion of the “metre” under the Revolution, and the use that is currently made of this abstract measure which does not correspond to anything human, like the foot or the hand. I wanted to make a demonstration on this subject, with the pictorial means that are mine. In these paintings, you will observe that there are no real flat tints; there is no anonymity. Each canvas has its own skin, with work on the material, on the choice of canvas, on the grain, on the texture… Hey, she’s a laundry woman!
S.A-
Is it a sensuality of gaze, with a different behavior for each painting?
Ph. L. –
I have no method, I refuse to multiply my gesture. It is the chance of images, ideas, words that trigger a process that leads me to the execution of a canvas. The problem is to put oneself at the service of the idea. As a result, I cannot have a formal systematic. I have to find in my own plastic means the ideal means to translate the idea submitted to me.
S.A-
You offer us “flash” images, dense and colorful images that are almost part of a collective unconscious.
Ph. L. –
Absolutely. I try to make unforgettable images, images that we remember globally. Moreover, the more I watch them exhibited, catalogued, photographed, the more I realize that they are different from each other. But at the same time, what amuses me a lot is that there is a false idea of progress and evolution that does not play at all for me. I challenge anyone who does not know my work to know what was done, between 1980 and 89, before or after.
S.A-
What roles do human figures play? They are often masked, or, on the contrary, put forward; better hide to better reveal? Why these caches?
Ph.L.-
This is part of the game that I propose. The spectator has an active role to play insofar as he is interested in what I propose. Otherwise, there is no dialogue. Look, at Sotheby’s, the people who buy Van Gogh have an active role. Hope they look good…