Emmanuel Lambion - "Clic",
Brussels, 2003







Clic

Exhibition Clic, Centre Culturel de la communauté Francaise Wallonie-Bruxelles Le Botanique, Brussels, 2003


Entangled, clasped, overlapping, confused, interlocking, upright, upsidedown, lying, hanging, overturned, turned over, elevated, two isolated, conjoined figure-objects, one blue, one red, twofold and united. Coupling. Clic.

On a white, painted background. Personalized still lifes or dehumanized portraits. Individualized objects, made human by the emotion they convey or objectified figures, reduced to their most mechanical essence?

Two figures, each complementing the other, polish off with power and soberness in the making, the open series of these little, square, numbered canvases.
Similar yet different, one can only distinguish these paintings from each other by the diverse combinations and connections of their protagonists which, in turn, merely confirm their sexual difference, their difference in temperament, using their antagonistic colours.

Seduction, strife, coupling? The art of painting, the expressive gesture establishes the immediate Eternity, the fragile nakedness of these intimate encounters.

The serial number identifies and the amount gives meaning. The metaphorical worth of these clashes wells up from the repetition in the diversity.

The classical technique of a painting, made up of layers and brushstrokes, is sensually reconciled by the nature of the portrayed subject.

Vigot: “Painting is a gesture of love: empathizing intensely with the subject, stroking the canvas incessantly. Corpus, even giving life.”

“ The brushstrokes are compliments.
I am polite. I give compliments.
I compliment my canvas.
I stroke and stroke, again and again.
We examine each other often.
It is a conversation.”

Alongside these mini-dramas, all variations of poses and forms, there are larger, much larger, canvases on which coloured spheres are portrayed that function as the volume‘s impenetrability which creates an endless array of light variations, senses and conveys with fragile brushstrokes the emotion of the sculpting of the sphere.

From the stretched canvas to the stuffed cushion, we switch over to the third declension of the pictorial spelling of Click. The medium, an ideal metaphorical transformation of the portrayed embraces, is here the cushion (‘coussin’, from the Latin vernacularism ‘coxinus’, a diminutive derived from ‘coxa’, thigh), one of the objects that you embrace, tightly hold on to of or squeeze together as much as you want. The cushion, soft and tender, a sculpture that is giving as well as sensitive to the touch, still offers a certain resistance. In the folds and seams that it imposes on its composition, its living substance cuts, assembles and composes.

Vigot: “Art is a state of confrontation.”

Her art, refined and fragile, feels, contemplates and unites the subject, the medium, the art of painting. With as many tears and folds as points of union and confrontation.