The Refusal of Any Excuse
Philippe Pirotte
Two nearly identical, purple-red color-stains on two walls in a corner of a gallery space invol-untarily remind us of a Rorsach-figure. Yet we see redoubling instead of mirroring and we notice subtle differences between the two stains in both size and color. Possibly we think of a Rorsach because of the printing technique, the forms are not painted but printed from a flat piece of paper against the wall and affix in traces that give away the pressure and the shoving of the paint. The second stain is thinner than the first one, sinks more into the wall, through which it seems to be applied with the same piece of paper of which the paint is already largely transferred to the other wall. Though in juxtaposing the two autono-mous images Kris Fierens calls up the idea of a Rorsarch, so anticipating its function - namely the stimulation of a projection at the same time he removes the images from this kind of coding.
Deliberately intended or not, these two images, brought together in an "installation", suggest a frame of interpretation that is able to hold the issues of Kris Fierens's recent and earlier work. The formal experi-ment, within its own reality, the used medium and its relation to a "beyond", to the occurring presence of an object, determine the field in which the meaning and the importance of Fierens's work manifests itself. A found object or a color, an act, a gesture or a frot-tage, not existing because of itself, but at the same time not representing anything, bring on a game of interpretation. Confronted with images of Kris Fierens the spectator automatically thinks of ordinary things: a pair of trousers, a bouquet of flowers, a mask, a cigarette with smoke, a dress... We always want to see something in it. This kind of reading is fascinating, but besides the point. Although Fierens doesn't want to avoid the inevitable mechanism of illusion and indeed plays with its desire, the question possibly lies not in what these images want to be. Kris Fierens moves the question to what we want from these images. It is indeed difficult to resist the temptation to move away from the images and not to lose ourselves in narrative or symbolic meaning, nor do these images offer us a chance to reduce them to pure visual-ity. The artist recognizes that the object, in its urgent physical presence, is the inducement to the making of a sculpture, an installation, a mural or an aquarelle. At the same time he stresses that the nature of the motif is eventually unimportant. The interpretative act of the spectator amuses him but is only interesting insofar that it reveals a desire. The object or the motif can't be a theme or a subject in itself but puts him to work, it touches him but at the same time remains at a distance. It is not situatable, not representable as an object.
It seems as if a fundamental distrust of every method of working that places a goal beyond the work, is exemplary within the artistic praxis of Kris Fierens. The moving of a material, an object, an act, a gesture or an experiment, through a dumbing interpretation - therefore conscious of its mediating - to the domain of art was already present in the earlier work of the artist that was associated with Arte Povera for the sake of convenience. Fierens indeed made his debut in the middle of the eighties with sculptures and installations linked up with the achievements of the Arte Povera, but combined these with the new assemblage techniques that were also launched by some younger sculptors in England. He shared the same associative freedom that celebrated the poetry of everyday non-art materials but recovered them in an aesthetic-formal domain. In this way he placed for example a tiny pinecone on a makeshift pedestal made of pottery, which causes an absurd image, through which the pinecone ironically, thanks to its placement, obtains a precious nature. In a later phase found objects become independent forms, cast in white plaster, so their origin becomes completely wiped out and they are purely appearance.
The inaccessible and absurd poetry of Fierens's early work restrains it from the interpretative fields of the Arte Povera. Though he uses the simplest materials and natural elements, the formal staging is finally more important than the creation of new things, through which this kind of work strategically, though maybe not in appearance, compares more to the cynic commodity sculpture than to the romantic purposes of Arte Povera. Found objects are treated as abstrac-tions, instead of attributing them transgressive or magical qualities. There's never utopia in Fierens's work.
The impossibility of a potency beyond art is rather a starting point. His work seduces but folds hack on itself within an aesthetic domain. In an elegant way it makes the spectator look like a fool.
Fierens doesn't feel the need to become an artist-alchemist and to make things of or to add things to the world, as if he distrusts the production of magical and miraculous deeds. The origin of things doesn't interest him, the finding back of it is irrelevant. It is rather their appearance that arouses his interest. For him art should occupy itself with the things of the world, but our sensory inability to indicate these things has already sent us many times on the imagi-nary road of the inner, as if it was an excuse. In Kris Fierens's work it is not about formulating something invisible, an idea or a thought, not about an idealistic understanding that denies the physical stroke and wants to compensate it with something else. Rather Fierens wants, through staging certain fragments or by researching the formal possibilities of sculpture, to light up the underlying structures that determine this "being struck". Also in the often architecturally inspired installations that came into existence later, the suspicion that Fierens wants to put himself out-side the creation gets confirmed. His reservedness to the idea of "creation", leads him to a discrete indication of elements from a complicated network of objects that, stripped from their real usefulness, obtain an atmospheric surplus value and start functioning within an aesthetic experience.
It is no coincidence that through the years Kris Fierens's artistical praxis evolved from sculpting over environments and installations to a more contained and immediate activity as painting. Yet the issue of painting is not the main concern of the artist. He is not a real painter and he gives the impression not being able to paint at all; often it looks clumsily made. By painting he positions himself in the first place con-sciously at the side, outside the belief in experiment or transformation, in a self-chosen, sovereign isolation. In that mode of painting he seems also not to want an immediate association with a moment that renewed the belief in painting. In recent years he concentrates mainly on a medium in painting that is usually asso-ciated with the amateur painter, or with the preparing or side activity of painting, namely aquarelle on paper. However they are not typical aquarelles. The paper is
hard, smooth and stiff. On large sizes Fierens works with water, paint and pigment. It gives the images a poor impression, which indicates the coherence with earlier sculptures, assemblages and installations.
During the making of these aquarelles the démarche differs fundamentally of that of a painter who sketch-es a shape here and there, takes a step back to estimate the effect, stops and then goes on again. Here the hand practices from work to work. A stroke reveals both initiative and hesitation. Restraints and acceler-ations, drive, vital pauses or frictions of the writing contemplate themselves and become part of the emerging motif. Yet Fierens is on guard against a first, too determined inspiration which is possibly just an effect. As a result lots of images eventually end up on the pile of indefinability.
In their gestuality the aquarelles show a spatial move-ment which makes them resonate in the realm of sculpture. Sometimes it seems as if we're dealing with pure painterly gestuality, which is not the case; in cer-tain works the gesture becomes the objet trouvé, the motif. In other works the gesture is transmitted by a "solution", a spreading pigment in a large quantity of water. The gesture is then thrown away in the dis-solvement of pigment and water. During the drying process the image forms itself as a sort of veil. Already in some of the earlier pieces on canvas we were con-fronted with a veil that at that time enclosed the whole surface. If we look at the recent aquarelles on paper we notice that the veil coincides with the image forming itself, not to conceal an object, but more like a sort of rarefied skin that allows the presupposed motif to come to an image or to carry its traces.
Fierens's images are not constituted in a bi-polar visual field, in which the viewer stands on one side and the object on the other. His images make that kind of focus ambiguous. The existence of an object finds itself in a process and you get to see a found fragment of it. We find ourselves at the limits of representation. The "solution" of a motif in a gesture or in turn of a gesture in a frottage or water wash can at the same time acknowledge and undermine representation. Nevertheless the images are located in a frame. Fierens acknowledges that looking is eventually fragmentary and moreover liable to time, but he doesn't want to surrender painting to an extensive theatrical display. Within the limitations of painting he shows that the
The impossibility of a potency beyond art is rather a starting point. His work seduces but folds hack on itself within an aesthetic domain. In an elegant way it makes the spectator look like a fool.
Fierens doesn't feel the need to become an artist-alchemist and to make things of or to add things to the world, as if he distrusts the production of magical and miraculous deeds. The origin of things doesn't interest him, the finding back of it is irrelevant. It is rather their appearance that arouses his interest. For him art should occupy itself with the things of the world, but our sensory inability to indicate these things has already sent us many times on the imagi-nary road of the inner, as if it was an excuse. In Kris Fierens's work it is not about formulating something invisible, an idea or a thought, not about an idealistic understanding that denies the physical stroke and wants to compensate it with something else. Rather Fierens wants, through staging certain fragments or by researching the formal possibilities of sculpture, to light up the underlying structures that determine this "being struck". Also in the often architecturally inspired installations that came into existence later, the suspicion that Fierens wants to put himself out-side the creation gets confirmed. His reservedness to the idea of "creation", leads him to a discrete indication of elements from a complicated network of objects that, stripped from their real usefulness, obtain an atmospheric surplus value and start functioning within an aesthetic experience.
It is no coincidence that through the years Kris Fierens's artistical praxis evolved from sculpting over environments and installations to a more contained and immediate activity as painting. Yet the issue of painting is not the main concern of the artist. He is not a real painter and he gives the impression not being able to paint at all; often it looks clumsily made. By painting he positions himself in the first place con-sciously at the side, outside the belief in experiment or transformation, in a self-chosen, sovereign isolation. In that mode of painting he seems also not to want an immediate association with a moment that renewed the belief in painting. In recent years he concentrates mainly on a medium in painting that is usually asso-ciated with the amateur painter, or with the preparing or side activity of painting, namely aquarelle on paper. However they are not typical aquarelles. The paper is
hard, smooth and stiff. On large sizes Fierens works with water, paint and pigment. It gives the images a poor impression, which indicates the coherence with earlier sculptures, assemblages and installations.
During the making of these aquarelles the démarche differs fundamentally of that of a painter who sketch-es a shape here and there, takes a step back to estimate the effect, stops and then goes on again. Here the hand practices from work to work. A stroke reveals both initiative and hesitation. Restraints and acceler-ations, drive, vital pauses or frictions of the writing contemplate themselves and become part of the emerging motif. Yet Fierens is on guard against a first, too determined inspiration which is possibly just an effect. As a result lots of images eventually end up on the pile of indefinability.
In their gestuality the aquarelles show a spatial move-ment which makes them resonate in the realm of sculpture. Sometimes it seems as if we're dealing with pure painterly gestuality, which is not the case; in cer-tain works the gesture becomes the objet trouvé, the motif. In other works the gesture is transmitted by a "solution", a spreading pigment in a large quantity of water. The gesture is then thrown away in the dis-solvement of pigment and water. During the drying process the image forms itself as a sort of veil. Already in some of the earlier pieces on canvas we were con-fronted with a veil that at that time enclosed the whole surface. If we look at the recent aquarelles on paper we notice that the veil coincides with the image forming itself, not to conceal an object, but more like a sort of rarefied skin that allows the presupposed motif to come to an image or to carry its traces.
Fierens's images are not constituted in a bi-polar visual field, in which the viewer stands on one side and the object on the other. His images make that kind of focus ambiguous. The existence of an object finds itself in a process and you get to see a found fragment of it. We find ourselves at the limits of representation. The "solution" of a motif in a gesture or in turn of a gesture in a frottage or water wash can at the same time acknowledge and undermine representation. Nevertheless the images are located in a frame. Fierens acknowledges that looking is eventually fragmentary and moreover liable to time, but he doesn't want to surrender painting to an extensive theatrical display. Within the limitations of painting he shows that the appearing object can not be identified with the object itself, or be caught in one glance. He shows the non-objectivity of the representation, he paints from an awareness of all other possible forms of appearance caused by the object and all other possible perceptions excluded by the viewer when he assumes his "look". As soon as the image withdraws from the frame it finds itself in a mobile continuum and it moves to a field of transformations, it can never become form or "eidos". There's the main concern of Fierens's work located, it's a kind of timing; where do you stop in the flow of transformations? How can you show an im-permanent form? The present status of an appearing object is inhabited by its past and its future in a con-tinuing movement of delay, which brings about that the object is never there. The objects show themselves through a series of aphoristic flashes. By opening the motif to forces that play in from the border - the paint gets taken along with the gesture but also with the water and the drying process - the spatiality of a frame gets broken within the image. In this way he opens the image to time, the fixed form surrenders to a field of transformations, the image is "thrown" on the paper, which makes it float. Fierens's works are coagulated in their materiality on their way to the image, in absolute silence, as traces of something that still has to take shape but of which now already a dis-appearing memory can be held.
Each of Kris Fierens's paintings looks different from the others showing a specific nature and its own struc-tural genesis. Going from his non-systematic method
of working - his gestuality never becomes style his work sometimes seems inconsistent, unstable. Improvisation, as a form of automatic activity, is not meant as an opening to the subconscious; it is more a reflex through which the result gets liberated from its subject. It reveals the necessity to take chances towards a medium, now cut lose from the guarantees of an artistic tradition, without loosing oneself in the adventures that want to destroy the autonomous atmosphere of art. No hypothesis is being formulat-ed; these are only wish dreams at the border of the discursive realization. With a persistent mauvaise foi against the kind of optimism that wants to demolish the barriers between art and life, nature and the social field, Fierens relocates the experiment, by replaying it in an esthetic-formal surrounding as a kind of "accident".
Meaning never arrives. Fierens's images seem to mock the spectator who never finds a symmetrical relation to the supposed representation of objects or process-es. At the same time a stubborn non-communication invites us, waits for approach but doesn't give keys to localization or temporalization. A radical imperma-nence makes the narrative delay, the translation, impossible. With his recent aquarelles Fierens refuses to yield to a theatrical tendency in the breaking down of an authoritarian point of view in the field of visu-ality. Within the work the glance is subjected to time: it is tried to formulate something that has the statute of both the existing and the developing, to reveal how an object produces presence.
