Capitulare de Villis
Work : Capitulare de Villis
Localisation : Le Triadou, Domaine du Haut-Lirou. June 2024
Reference text :
My niece started painting. On social media, she took the artist name Capitulare de Villis. So I owe her the discovery of this Carolingian inventory that I knew nothing about and whose section devoted to French flora is one of the oldest of its kind to have come down to us. The slightly provocative – or at least nostalgic – nature of this pseudonym at a time when plant species are disappearing at high speed will of course have escaped no one. But comparison is not reason and if a good millennium separates us from this early Middle Ages, the conceptual and aesthetic gap is at least as important as the time gap. The relationship to the world in general and to nature in particular was very different from ours for a scholar of that time, not to mention the relationship to images. Today, screens are everywhere, our collective environment is saturated with forms that are increasingly generated on their own and more and more quickly via artificial intelligence. In the past, the copyist had, day after day and month after month, the feeling of participating in an exceptional work that only a few privileged aristocrats would have the leisure to look at, understand and keep with them for centuries to come. Each plant, each line, each color had its history, its symbolism. It is also this language, this culture in the full sense of the term, which will soon disappear definitively with its source of plant inspiration. In the meantime, I began to explore online certain masterpieces of the past, such as the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, whose half-erased memory went back to my distant studies in art history. At the time, the reproductions were of lower quality, when they were not yet in black and white (Yes, even in the 90s!). Today – and paradoxically thanks to the mediation of screens – I was dazzled. It was also true that the word illumination came from the word light. There was gold, bold colours, the unexpected, freedom: in short, everything I loved. Not to mention, as is often the case with me, a particular penchant for the margins where the exuberant creativity of the time flourished at leisure.
But as I wrote in the first paragraph, I was like a person who hears a foreign language, who appreciates its intonations, its musicality without being able to fully decipher its meaning. And the acanthus leaves, the volutes that inspired me, once reused, in no way gave a view of a chivalrous world, they formed mutant and monstrous plants that at most prefigured the advent of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Between irony, lucidity and despair, I imagined in doing so on my canvases a burnt, polluted, irradiated desert from which man was most often absent.
One thing, however, in the illuminator’s attitude and in mine seemed to transcend the ages:
In the past, monks painted on vellum, that is, on the skin of newborn calves, slaughtered and tanned. Today, I was foolishly painting flowers with acrylic paint composed of petroleum residues… The circle was complete.
Fortunately, this way of celebrating nature by destroying it would have an end, I knew it. One day, soon, when man would stop looking at nature, it would flourish again.