MARFA –– MAINTENANT is proud to present EXFORME, an exhibition of paintings made by French artist Philippe Tourriol in Marfa during his summer 2023 residency with the experimental studio and research program Fieldwork: Marfa.
Part of the founding narrative of modern painting was made of “a history of pots,” and Tourriol may certainly have been aware of this. One thinks of the distorted pots and compote dishes in Cézanne’s still life but also of the legion of pots, carafes and absinthe glasses deconstructed and reconstructed by Picasso in search of a pure space for visual experimentation. Philippe Tourriol may well have been thinking about this history of the pot at the dawn of modern painting when he produced his new paintings. Indeed, the pot in Tourriol’s paintings seems to be the initiator of a reverie, or perhaps the memory, of a founding motif of painting, and beyond that, the thought of an ancient and universal archetypal form, with feminine connotations, referring to the origins of the material manufacture of objects, and maybe also to the foundations of the art of the sedentary society. As prehistoric and ethnographic research shows, this original pot may embody a reproductive and protective form containing fertile water, oils, seeds, medicines, and the alcohol used in libations. But it can just as easily be seen as a mournful and funereal object, containing the effects or ashes of the dead.
Looking at Philippe Tourriol’s pots painted on loose canvases and seeking to perceive their “resonance,” the pot also seems to appear as a sonorous object. In one of his large dark canvases, the painter evokes the pots by their outlines, and it looks like they might clash, overlap, sound like resonators, creating a kind of optical polyphony.
Finally, Tourriol’s paintings are echoing the work of art historian Meyer Shapiro who established a parallel between the sedentarization of human groups in the Neolithic period, the agriculture, the parceling out of the land, the invention of a new form of painting and the invention of pottery. According to Shapiro the painting of this time is based on the visual and textural occupation of a specific rectangle background, abstract and mobile, cut out of bark, skin or canvas. It is this closed, active, and dynamic field of the canvas rectangle that will host the “imaging substance,” i.e. the lines, contours, stains and outpourings of paint. In this way, the loose canvases of Tourriol, where archaic pots emerge and “speak,” affirming their materiality, in other words they are a fundamental matrix, where all the gestures, signs and imaginings of the painting to come can emerge.
The show, which is open every Saturday from 6-8 p.m. and runs from March 23 through April 20, will also be an opportunity to see and experience new works by Natalie Melendez, Diana Simard, Matt Scobey, Randy Sanchez and T.J. Tambellini.