Negotiations

A surface like a faux terrain on which a battle has just been brought to a close: such might be our first impression before the recent works of Mikaël Monchicourt. Yet the struggle that played out here is not to be sought in the source images he uses, for there is nothing bellicose about them. It lies rather in the experimentation with gestures and media of which these panels preserve the trace. Thus, beneath a smooth surface of resin, one discerns an accumulation of strata which, through “the connections that are formed, have every appearance of a catastrophe, that is to say of a collision [or] an unexpected turbulence of events ¹”, as Jean Baudrillard would put it. Through an often empirical process, a balance is struck between control and chance. In Tanneurs (2020), an image taken from Diderot’s Encyclopédie is enlarged so as to make the grain of the original engraving more visible, then drawn in ink on an aluminium plate. Over this ground are layered scraps of aluminium foil, which light up the composition here and there, and sheets of rhodoid bearing digital screen patterns printed in inkjet. Using various chemicals and water, the artist then unsettles the whole, creating pools, fractures and vibrations of matter, ranging from a slight undulation of lines and forms to their complete liquefaction. Our gaze is drawn into the intricacy of these layers and, through them, led to consider the work as a palimpsest.

To draw close to the surface, then, is to gain access to poiesis, to those experiments which, as they accumulated, have shaped a foliated space. This space tends to problematize “the relation between the lost ground of representation and the screen-support ²” of the work. Here, the image drawn in ink, with its own perspectival space, is parasitized by fluctuations of matter. Depth of field therefore remains very shallow. It is no longer a matter of plunging unawares into an illusionistic space, but of questioning the zone that at once separates and connects us: that threshold between our eye and the object observed. Our reflection, cast on the glossy surface of the panels, points precisely to a relational in-between space, echoing the one that, in essence, binds us to the sensible. We come to understand, then, that the image produced and its flesh can no longer be analysed separately. On the contrary, they intertwine and lead us towards an ontological reflection on the image. In this respect, the recent works draw on the thought of the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson who, in his book Formes et Croissance ³ (1917), seeks to explain the evolution of living forms through physical forces and constraints. In the same vein, one may consider that the final layer of resin, which freezes the chemical mutations the artist has experimented with, sustains a surface tension between us and the work. This tension is, in essence, a force that maintains a tenuous equilibrium at the interface between two fluids. In Mikaël Monchicourt’s works, it designates the ambiguity of our relationship to images, and therefore to the world.

The various operations of alteration, transformation, covering, visual aberration or excavation wear the image down, even sterilize it. The gestures that shape it while mistreating it find themselves imprisoned in the material, as if stopped in their tracks. The final layer of resin homogenizes the surface and partly cancels out the expressiveness of certain areas of the compositions. Far from distancing us from the making of the work, this smoothing problematizes its relationship with the image. Faced with it, we are invited to look beyond the allure of its appearances and to dwell on the modalities of its appearing. Juki (2021), for instance, confronts us with forms entangled and scattered across space. Their density prevents any immediate distinction between the figurative elements and their various strata. The word “Juki”, repeated many times over, appears as a clue to the subject. It is in fact the name of a Japanese brand of industrial sewing machines, ubiquitous in textile factories in Asia and across the globe. A few machines then begin to emerge from this agglomeration of forms. The green background against which they unfold, recalling the chroma-key techniques used for special effects in film and television, tips the composition into the realm of the virtual. Implicitly, it sheds light on globalized production networks through the recurring presence of a single brand in the royalty-free images devoted to the garment industry. This green background nevertheless calls for a second reading. Painted in oil, it ultimately brings the work back into the register of painting. This manual act thus becomes the receptacle of a virtual space that speaks of the plasticity and mobility of images in the digital age.

This shift should be understood in response to the constant oscillation between an analogue world and a digital one that lies at the heart of the artist’s concerns. These incessant shifts have conferred “on the image a logical identity ⁴” whose “informational mode of processing ⁵” finds expression in the act of calculation, as Alain Renaud explains. From Le bureau du statisticien (2014) to the recent works, Mikaël Monchicourt analyses the inexorably variable conditions of existence of this hypothetical reality and of its visual appendages. By subverting his images through a range of techniques, he enters their “specular abyss ⁶” and affirms their fundamental indeterminacy. This hollow deconstructs the illusion of their uniqueness and opens onto the multiplicity of their interpretations. This defeat, finally, recalls Magritte’s thinking on “the treachery of images”. What we see is not what we read, and what we think we read is perhaps not what ought to be read. Herein, no doubt, lies the explanation for the recurring presence of transfer letters on many of the panels. From Alphabet (2017) to Vague (2017), by way of etc. (2017), these letterings form no narrative, but drift across the surface of the works like so many clues to the artist’s approach. They are at once material, signs, the possibility of sounds, and visual rhythms. Through these plural definitions, Mikaël Monchicourt constantly invites us to be wary of the visible. He seems thereby to suggest that to perceive the world is to set in motion a mechanism of negotiations.