Materialistic paintings

Work : Materialistic paintings.

Materialistic paintings to make the artist a living. Various sizes.

Location : Montpellier, France, 2010 / 2015.

Statement :

Porcieu, October 30, 2011,

In Berlin, one day I met a very old gentleman who had experienced the hyperinflation of 1924. He told me how he went to get his bread with handfuls of notes denominated in millions of marks. He described to me how barter had, at the time, begun to take precedence over money. The smallest tool, trinket or kilo of ham was worth much more than all the pieces of paper with outrageous amounts issued by the Weimar Republic. We returned to the solid, to the concrete.
I think about it often when observing today the surges in gold, oil and raw materials caused in particular by the excesses of finance.
It is clear that scriptural money, which springs from the virtual accounts of central banks to ricochet endlessly from clearing houses to computers speculating at high frequency, must seem evanescent to us. It disappears at the slightest crash and even the financiers who drink it with plenty of bonuses quickly convert it into concrete reality, into solid assets. If this bling bling is excessively visible, audible, tangible, it is because it reveals, as a counterpoint, a form of immense emptiness, a “dematerialization” which does not only concern finance, but all aspects of our lives.
Today, we spend our days in front of screens, we work on them, then we congratulate, for example, a “friend” on Facebook for his latest photos, all while listening to mp3 music sent by another. All this time, this creative energy, this collective intelligence being, of course, also recycled by a digital economy producing in a loop this new form of… immaterial value.
In a sense, we can see this contemporary way of life as an immense machine for dematerializing the world. In reality, she is more of a grinder that destroys the materiality of this world.
Indeed, not everything is virtual in this technological hyperconsumption: a personal computer consumes real energy. A mega server like Google’s much more. Each request on this engine produces 14 g of C0². Worse, having an avatar in the Second Life game consumes as much energy per year as an average Brazilian, or 1,752 kilowatt hours!! And what about the exponential quantity of raw materials needed to manufacture our electronic components with planned obsolescence?
Little by little, with growth for the Holy Grail, we are constantly squandering the irreplaceable elements making up our biosphere. “Nothing is lost, nothing is created” said Lavoisier. Yes, but…
The famous Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has been updating the “doomsday clock” since 1947, has just officially warned humanity that we are now at 11:55 p.m. There is an existential risk. We too could physically disappear.
Faced with this, I feel lost. How to think about this world, where to go in this postmodern atmosphere of “end of ideologies”? I have the confused feeling that there is also a void in the field of ideas, an unfulfilled expectation that Malraux famously underlined: “the 21st century will be spiritual or it will not be”.
And the solution will surely not come from the proselytes whose religious obscurantism rushes into every crack of gaping despair.
Seen from the tip of my nose, in opposition to all this emptiness, I only see a return to the fundamentals of a family of naked monkeys, more turbulent than the others. Our society is said to be too materialistic; I have the feeling that it is not enough. I am talking about a materialism of urgency, of shortage, that of starving or freezing to death.
The materialism of someone who, anchored in an unbearable present, does not care that matter is only a condensed state of energy.
Science has its limits, so-called “progress” scares me more than it amazes me. Nanotechnologies, transgenderism, ectogenesis, surveillance satellites, nuclear deterrence, despite themselves, deliver to us this unequivocal empirical observation, the relationship of subordination which binds us to matter: And by acting on it in a manner recklessly, rather than solving our problems, we get closer to our individual and perhaps even collective finitude…

Faced with this contemporary man dispossessed, soon even of his bodily integrity, faced with this humanity which is falling, failing to console myself with great ideals, I have an instinctive, animal reflex: that of clinging to the cliff, to rock that sticks out.
My rock, always, has been painting. Lately, I come back to it with relief. Aware of the stability this gives me.

 



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