To Paint is to Love Again
Curated by Louise Sartor
9 rue des Cascades, Paris
09.04.26 — 27.05.26
Genevieve Asse, Sadie Benning, (after) Rosa Bonheur, Whitney Claflin, Anne-Lise Coste (Uruk), Jean Dubuffet, Jean Hugo, Ulala Imai, Françoise Lapeyre, Li Shan, Naoki Sutter-Shudo
For someone who has studied art for a long time, there is something almost irritating about listening* to Henry Miller brag about how bad he is at painting, about how envious his painter friends are of him. “Painters seem intrigued by the little tricks which enable me to get around difficulties. Sometimes they say to me: ‘I wish I had the courage to do that!’ As if it took courage on my part! When I explain that it was out of sheer ignorance that I did my houses that way, the usual reply is: ‘That doesn’t matter. You’ve had a good time. And after all, it makes a picture, doesn’t it?’” (1)
It’s important to have fun. I see that my own paintings become bad when I’m not having fun, if the work becomes a chore instead of the object of happily devoted concentration, of a focused and childlike absorption.
“How often have I tried to copy or imitate a child’s work! (…) Sometimes someone has come upon me during one of my painting frenzies and exclaimed: ‘What gay colors you have there! What freedom! How you must be enjoying yourself!’ But that is only the joy of the man-child. I have never seen a child at work express that sort of joy. Children are far too absorbed and captivated by what they are doing to be aware of any marginal emotion. Whatever a child does, whether his work expresses fear, horror or anguish, the effect it produces on the spectator is always the same: joy. A child’s work never fails to provoke us, to appeal to us, because it is always honest and sincere, always imbued and permeated with that almost magical assurance which comes from a direct and spontaneous approach to objects.” (1)
...
Li shan is also self-taught and also put painting on the backburner for thirty years or so, but his painting can only be thought of as naïve through a contemporary Western gaze. There was nothing naïve about painting still lives and landscapes in China in the 70s, or only dangerously so. Under the Cultural Revolution, these genres were considered to be bourgeois art, reason enough for Li shan to be threatened with a purge. He used to meet up in secret with members of his group Wuming (No Name Painting Association) and paint en plein air together. (4) One couldn’t really say if their paintings are impressionist, shanshui, academic or avant-garde, or whether this really matters. No genre or style is subversive in and of itself anymore, now it’s more the context and the artist’s intention that might make it so — or not.
...
“To paint is to love again, and to love is to live intensely. But what kind of love, what kind of life can one hope to find in a void cluttered with every imaginable instrument, with every possible profiteer, with the latest comfort, with all the useless luxuries? To live and to love and to express it through painting implies that one be a true believer as well. But then there must be something to adore.” (1)
In an era when hatred is regaining so much ground, continuing to paint demands a certain kind of faith, and to paint with love is a political position. The choice of subject is not so important and is rather specific to each painter. The terms faith and religion have been corrupted by dogma and their rejection is understandable. But the existence of a certain feeling precedes their invention and survives them, having given rise to the first manifestations of what we now name “art,” and is perhaps more relevant that ever.
“Face to face with a world founded upon a brutal materialism where everything is evaluated according to material well-being and where religion, after having lost much ground, is no longer the biggest spender of spiritual value, […] I think that today more than ever the artist has a para-religious mission to accomplish: to keep the flame of one’s interior vision burning, one that the work of art seems to be the closest profane translation.” (9)
“Art is the ultimate form of spiritual transcendence, the sublimation of instincts, the overcoming of real, sensual, material contingencies. On a more basic level, it’s a human activity that never did anyone any harm.” (10)
Louise Sartor
Translation - Aodhen Madden
I recommend listening to Miller read the text himself, available on YouTube
https://youtu.be/uJ2tBIal0cw?si=f1wqfj3SfyzJiUa8
(1) Henry Miller, To Paint Is to Love Again
(2) Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants [Prospectus and All Subsequent Writings]
(3) Pierre Bourdieu, Questions sur l’art pour et avec les élèves d’une école mise en question [Questions about Art for and with Students of a School Called into Question]
(4) See the documentary The No Name Painting Association by Rene Balcer and Joe Griffin, available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJQsZecXe3s
(5) Agnes Martin, Writings
(6) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
(7) Patti Smith, Just Kids
(8) Rosa Bonheur & Anna Klumpke, Souvenirs de ma vie [Memories of My Life]
(9) Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe [Duchamp: Sign of the Times]
(10) Yvette Szczupak Thomas, Un Diamant brut [A Rough Diamond]
