The ethereal, elegiac paintings of Marc Desgrandchamps might bring to mind the legendary fresco scene in Fellini’s "Roma," 1972. Amid frantic subway excavations a wall is penetrated, admitting a group of observers into a long-buried 1st-century villa replete with sensuous carvings and exquisite frescoes. As one character says, they look as if they could have been painted yesterday. But the very act of discovery spells doom. The air whistling behind the intruders’ ears sucks the pigment out of the murals right before their eyes. The experience is literally exhilarating: It’s not the gaze that the figures in the paintings return but the breath.
Freshness and decay. Stasis and transience. Classical and modern. Despite a lack of overt tension, a general mood, indeed, of luxe, calme et volupté, Desgrandchamps’s paintings are characterized by dualities, by inherent contradictions. These, of course, are what make them contemporary. In a characteristically post-postmodern way, a lack of anxiety is what makes these anxious objects, instilling in the viewer a precarious sense of the condition of painting. A kind of dustiness in the palette, a distressed, bleached-out quality to the surfaces, a tendency of one form to peek through another, lends these newly minted works a ready-made disintegration. (In knowing violation of the rules of good painting, Desgrandchamps likes to paint thin over thick to achieve this effect, a kind of transparency as much his own as layered filigree was Francis Picabia’s.) Fade in Desgrandchamps is a signifier of feyness, as if the paintings themselves are stressing at the fate of their medium.
And yet there is robustness in his painterly touch that can equally impart the opposite impression. As much as he loves fade and overlap, drip is another popular means of conveying image instability. But whereas transparency suggests disintegration, drip — with its connotations of urgency and presence — implies coming into being, which is the opposite.
This odd cohabitation of confidence and doubt in Desgrandchamps imparts an ambiguous authorial presence. His hand and his command of image are at once cool and vulnerable, invested and blithe, reflexive and reactive. The mood can be intensely connected and yet, at the same time, somehow nonchalant: Distended forms and dissipated brushstrokes exude a fin de siècle equivalent of a “whatever” kind of adolescent shrug.
Desgrandchamps, who was born in 1960, is widely hailed as one of the most significant painters of his generation in France, and one of remarkably few breathing new life into a national tradition. In the literature about the artist, references to the Fontainebleau school, Nicolas Poussin, and Aristide Maillol abound. Unusually for him, a painting in this exhibition, his second solo show in New York, quotes directly from another painting, Degas’s "Young Spartans Exercising," circa 1860. His midcareer retrospective at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris was a rare instance in which a contemporary artist’s works flowed naturally from historic collections hanging in proximity — particularly those interwar artists like André Derain or Carlo Carrà whose turn toward tradition exudes a delicately awkward primitivism.
His translucent figures are at once airy and grounded, chimerical and solid — matter-of-factly in the here and now. The setting in a typical Desgrandchamps is outdoors, a desert or beach scene. The figures — mostly stocky, earthy, statuesque women but occasional lithe fashion-model types and men, too — are self-absorbed in low-energy recreational activities. His pictures are always untitled and rarely characterized by significant or memorable activity. This forces anyone coming to terms with his work to think of it on a continuum rather than as a set of specific images, a tendency bolstered by a consistent palette of gently pervasive blue for sea and sky and subdued earth tones. There can be repetition of a very closely similar motif with subtle variations from one canvas to another, and the same scene is often viewed twice within a diptych with a marginal sense of dislocation of time in almost cinematic terms, as if from one frame to the next.
Cinema provides another paradigm within which to view Desgrandchamps, a complement, or maybe a riposte, to that of painting-in-distress. Movies are his most fecund source of imagery, or, as he puts it, of “image opportunities.” Desgrandchamps favors scenes that can be characterized as anti-iconic. He grabs stills from DVDs, his most popular sources being Italian neorealism and French New Wave. Movies often deliberately climax with a still-worthy image that resembles the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti’s pictorial moment that encapsulates all aspects of the narrative and its symbolism. But the moments before or after such visual climax, when frozen, generate a casualness more conducive to the ambiguity these paintings favor. True to the character of cinema, Desgrandchamps prefers what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze characterized as “any-instant-whatevers” to “privileged instants” in the frames he freezes as ways to generate an image.
Typically in Desgrandchamps, figures or motifs elide rather than confront one another. Overlapping or layered forms seem more to cross-fade than to collide. They are like misregistered projections from different sources. The latest body of paintings shown here also includes a pair of figures in classical garb that function almost as witnesses, at some distance from more contemporary protagonists. But they are more like a Greek chorus than like supernatural intruders: Their intervention is dramaturgic rather than dramatic.
The classicism of Desgrandchamps — the evocation of statuary, the timeless garb of some of his figures, the Mediterranean light, the sense of frescoes fading, and his special affinity with Poussin — might put him on the side of the privileged instant. But his preference for self-absorbed figures, often alienated from other characters and indifferent to their surroundings and situation, suggest that as the composer of the image, Desgrandchamps is checking in with a narrative under way rather than posing his figures meaningfully: His role is passive and casual, in other words. Tellingly, in the Degas transcription, he collapses the space between his selectively isolated foreground and middle-ground figures to complicate the neat compression of space and time in Degas’s classical composition — as well as to induce a dreamy, cinematically distended narrative flow.
Rather than as an event, therefore, it is better to think of a Desgrandchamps composition as a passage. The lack of titles and ubiquity of palette that I mentioned earlier create a sensation, in any gathering of his works, of being inside one continuous painting. The individual canvases are, in movie terms, frames. Correspondingly, when one is actually viewing a single work there is a sense of other images — before and after images — present within it, making the canvas, metaphorically, less a frame of film than part of the action of several frames spooling.
Desgrandchamps paints a moving image. More than that, he paints the very sensation of image movement. And yet, his paintings impart a grave, calm sense of order, solid and durable, like the art of the museums. He fixes flow.
To see images from Marc Desgrandchamps at Zürcher Studio, click on the slide show.
This review appears in the July/August 2012 issue of Modern Painters.