Nina Léger and Jean Daniélou: In conversation with Alix Le Méléder
Published in Alix Le Méléder: Traces, peinture, Editions Tituli, Paris, 2016. Translated from the French by Gwenaël Kerlidou
From September 14 to November 6, 2022, the Zürcher Gallery in New York presented a one-person exhibition of Alix Le Méléder’s “Les Grandes Rouges” (the large red ones), a series of paintings produced by the French artist between 2002 and 2007 and never shown in the US before. These powerful works impressed many painters in New York then but also proved somewhat difficult to understand in terms of background and context.
The interview below, translated from the French into English, originally took place at the artist’s home in Burgundy in the summer of 2015, four years after she had resolved to cease her activities as a painter in 2011. That exchange was included in a small book titled Alix Le Méléder: Traces, peinture published in 2016 by Editions Tituli (Paris) under Jean Daniélou’s direction. The book gathered interviews with the artist and texts by historians, philosophers, and writers who had been following her work and who were trying to make sense of a decision which surprised many in France at the time.
This conversation of Alix Le Méléder with historian Nina Léger and philosopher Jean Daniélou offers precious insights into the painter’s evolution and creative process. The hope is that its translation will help fill the information gap in English about where these “large red paintings” might have come from.
—Gwenaël Kerlidou
VEZELAY, FRANCE, SUMMER 2015
NL/JD: What is this big painting hanging in the Foyer?
ALM: It’s a painting from before the fire.
NL/JD: Can you describe it?
ALM: It is an important painting, which came out with strong clarity. When I was working on it, I had a feeling of unity that I ended up specifically looking for later. I’m surprised that I felt it specifically with this painting which did survive the fire.
There is a sort of projection of my unconscious in this figurative piece. I think that this is what troubled me, this kind of self-centered aspect of my work at the time. I had to free myself from my own psychological mechanisms. I was on the wrong path. The studio burned down a few days after I finished it.
NL/JD: What was the outcome of that fire?
ALM: It happened at a moment of self-doubt when I felt lost. I knew I had to paint, but why, how, and where to start, I had no clue. The fire did not produce anything per se, but it precipitated a process which had already begun. With all my work now lost, I had to begin anew from scratch.
Back then, I was throwing out everything I was doing as I went along. Then I was offered a space in the temporary studios of the Bretonneau Hospital where I remained until November 1992. I had a terrible time there. Months and months of work. I could not finish anything. The paintings were just mud and chaos.
At the end of that year, I moved into a studio on the Rue du Château des Rentiers in Paris, where I worked until July 2011. That’s where I started to rebound. I realized that space on the canvas organized itself according to my perception of time. That was my initial intuition: to work on the perception of time. First on small square sheets of paper, and then on larger ones where I tried to confirm what I experimented on the small ones.
NL/JD: Was this when you began to rotate the canvas?
ALM: Gesture came out of size. I had to work on the perception of a 360-degree space. The square format and its rotation expand the limited 180-degree field of perception which usually defines paintings. The rotation only lasts for the time of each painting session, and when the painting is finished, its position, top and bottom, right and left, are all finally established.
NL/JD: Your painting seems to have followed this rotating motion and progressively focused on the four edges of the canvas. When did this dynamic emerge?
ALM: It appeared progressively. The disengaging impulse happened little by little. The center pushed the painting towards its edges. I had a show in Fresnes in 1997, where the void, which had been settling progressively in the paintings, became clearer and where the white center became more present.
NL/JD: How did this specific focus on painting and its edges generate the four brushstrokes which would become the organizing principle of the rest of your work?
ALM: There were two critical paintings which convinced me that it all had to go through the four marks.
These two paintings, from 1998, stood out. They told me that I was on the right track. At that point, I was starting something new, not just based on a perception of time, but on trying to grasp that moment of rupture in my time perception, between chronological time and unified time (global time). With the four marks, I went into a self-examination mode.
NL/JD: One feels that you are imprinting something on the canvas, but without the will to represent, without intention.
ALM: In figurative painting, there is a will to represent. That’s not my thing. Contrary to most painters, I don’t have a particular subject matter. I’m not even the subject here. I’m just a Guinea pig. The painting makes it possible to manifest a state of being, to become aware, not the opposite. Usually, these states are considered as temporary ecstatic “phenomena,” as some sort of clairvoyance operating when one accesses their own unity. I attempt to catch them, not just to keep them but to see where they’ll lead me and what they can teach me. Will I be able to grasp them? Where will they bring me? I try to follow that thread.
NL/JD: Is there any intentionality in your color choices? Looking at your red paintings for example…
ALM: I have all the colors in front of me. But I work with very few colors, only primaries. Blue, yellow, red, and also black and white. For example, when there is a green, it’s because I first dipped my brush in blue and, at the next rotation, I dipped it in yellow. The mixing happens on the canvas. The colors mix and interact directly on the canvas without preconceived intention.
NL/JD: So, all intentionality is gone?
ALM: Yes, I take the subway to get to the studio. When I arrive, I find my paintings, my turpentine, I take a new canvas, or I rework a previous one, and after that I won’t look at it anymore. I try to focus on the elimination of my thoughts. I move from one state to another and when I reach a state beyond things, I move on to the painting. Sometimes there is a swing of consciousness, from one extreme to the other, as specific as the transition between being awake and being asleep.
NL/JD: Which would you select as a working model: the sleeping state or the waking state?
ALM: I was taking the example of sleep to better emphasize the rupture, the swing of consciousness between two states. We are more aware of it when we fall asleep. As in the expression “to fall asleep,” when there is this impression of falling, of transitioning between states.
NL/JD: Is it that state which allows for painting to happen, or is it painting which allows for that state?
ALM: My intention has always been for painting to teach me. I realized that I had to become an empty vessel, to be detached. Only then would I coincide with painting and painting would be dictated to me with simplicity and clarity: painting as a catalyst.
NL/JD: But, those gestures, who is it that is producing them?
ALM: Was it the unity grasped after going through all these phases which allowed me to bring the painting to conclusion with clarity, or as I mentioned, was it the opening reached through the void which allowed for something beyond me to dictate it to me? I don’t know. The fact is that the medium of painting forced me to follow a thread. If that medium had not been there as a guide, I couldn’t have moved forward.
NL/JD: Could you describe these gestures to us?
ALM: The gesture is very simple. It is only a matter of laying down paint on canvas as marks, as a point of departure to reach further.
NL/JD: What about the red paintings?
ALM: That was a difficult period in my life. I was probably intervening on the canvas too early. The marks were going through every possible color and the paint was building up. But in the end, when the painting was done, it always came out red.
Alix Le Méléder, Figure, 1989. Oil on canvas, 59 x 35 2/5 inches
NL/JD: You seemed to work a lot less on the last paintings?
ALM: Yes, I did learn that the struggle had to take place before I started to paint, instead of looking for it during the painting session.
NL/JD: Was it that sort of delaying of the gesture, which, taken to its extreme, led to your decision to stop painting?
ALM: No, it had nothing to do with it. I had withdrawn myself; I didn’t have to struggle to reject myself anymore to let the painting happen. Everything was simple and clear. This work was becoming an infinite repetition. I didn’t feel the need to continue. I’ve always worked out of necessity, and when I didn’t feel it anymore, I stopped.
NL/JD: The believers in the idea of interruption often prefer to put forward a rhetoric of failure and of the impossible …
ALM: In my case it is not a failure. I was very privileged to be able to go all the way to the end of this adventure thanks to painting. Stopping from one day to the next completely changed all my habits and I had to ask myself: What now? I still had to continue that search, but I couldn’t complete it with painting. In some ways, the studio was like a prison cell right from the beginning. I spent 25 years there, because that kind of confinement allowed me to reach a true kind of freedom. The same for the rigid structure of the four marks. They limited my field, forced me to go deeper, to let go of all the connections oppressing us unconsciously. I never thought that I could possibly stop one day. It was infinite, and actually it was infinite, but the state that I could reach with painting would always be the same.
NL/JD: You were telling us about your thoughts that this state of being overwhelmed could be reached through a modification of the painting structure, going from four down to three and then two marks. But you realized that it was not the correct way to go, that the overwhelming phenomenon could only happen if you kept the structure of the four marks.
ALM: I don’t think it was really a question of organizing the marks, but rather it was a moment in my evolution when I didn’t need to intervene on the four sides. But after exploring further and needing a support to move forward, I had to put them in question as well.
And then I wondered if I didn’t need the four strokes as a sort of cosmic structure, of rotation like a big clock, with the painting concluding itself in a kind of suspension of time.
NL/JD: Did the cessation of the activity of painting also mean that you ceased being a painter?
ALM: I don’t know if I ever was a painter. Painting was a means to an end, a catalyst, a medium that I used. I don’t know that I ever was a painter. My painter friends speak of painting’s sensuality, of the search for the right color, the right shape. I’m very far from all that.
My decision to stop painting is often misunderstood as a sign of a temporary bad rut. But that’s not what it’s about. Painting allowed me to evolve until I didn’t need to use it anymore. To sum up: I had an experience with painting which I pursued up until it didn’t bring me anything anymore.
NL/JD: Do you think that other artists consider their work instead in terms of progression and achievement?
ALM: No, I think they speak about evolution, of periods, but generally, painting remains experimental. Of course, for most painters, it is a question of evolution, of formal experimentation. In my case it’s more initiatic.
NL/JD: Are you weary of the categories of critical and historical discourse?
ALM: I am weary of all categories and classifications. They lead to a priories and all kinds of unnecessary intellectual positionings, which only keep you from being open to really appreciate a work of art.
NL/JD: After the fire, you moved away from the connection you had with Abstract Expressionism?
ALM: Yes, after the fire, I understood that I had to confront my own self and painting at the same time. It had to come from me and from paint—I mean color pigments. I was confronting that aspect without looking for exterior inspirations.
NL/JD: Would you be closer to music or text? Music being barely referential, where the word is in a position of reference to the world.
ALM: Yes, it would be music (J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue), or poetry (haiku). But in music, there is a beginning, a development, and an end. Music takes place in duration where painting is in the instant. Same in literature; the reader is captivated through duration. A book can take its time to captivate the reader. That’s not the case with painting. Painting doesn’t have the same emerging timeframe as a book or a piece of music. In my opinion, my painting is closer to haiku, to a sort of instantaneous general apprehension.
NL/JD: One often looks at the strokes one by one in the big paintings. You look at one, then move on to the next, etc. It is different with the small paintings which can be apprehended all at once.
ALM: It is important to be at the right distance from the canvas to grasp it as a whole, and what I think is essential is this whole, not the separate marks. You speak about the marks but not of the central white area. Of course, the central white area depends on the marks. But this white, is it empty or haunted? In my view, it’s not empty, it’s the bull’s eye of the target. When you look at the marks one after the other, you can’t feel the presence of the body inhabiting the painting itself. It is a kind of incarnation of painting.
NL/JD: One could easily reduce your paintings to structural geometries: The cross, the square, the circle… But this is most likely a mistake. How do you relate to works which use geometric shapes?
ALM: One can see geometric structures in music, and even more in painting. Geometry, rhythm, color, light, are all part of the language of painting. Painters have been using geometric shapes to compose, simplify, and analyze their subject, even spontaneously.
There are also painters who lean on geometric shapes in order to go beyond them, which sometimes results in very alive paintings.
Now, if you are referring to artists who use geometry for itself, coldly and conceptually; they don’t interest me. Obviously, structure is essential to my work: Four brushstrokes in a square, the circular form of the rotation, the dialogue between the marks, the cross.
NL/JD: A geometric form refers to the idea of a preexisting form, already instituted and that can be repeated. For your part, you call your colored forms “taches” (stains), but the contour of a stain is more difficult to define.
ALM: In my case there is absolutely no formal game.
Alix Le Méléder, Untitled, 15.04.2003. Oil on canvas, 78 4/5 x 78 4/5 inches. Courtesy Zürcher gallery, NY
NL/JD: Why do you prefer the use of the word “tache,” when to better qualify the nature of your painting, one could also speak of imprints, of trace, or of stigma? Why use that term, which in our accepted semantic field, often refers to a mistake, to a mark left in error?
ALM: When I started to work on the four “taches,” it’s possible that I called them such with the idea of blemish or smudge in mind. The word “trace” might work, as the traces of the distance traveled toward the painting’s resolution. Can they be called “imprints” when the painting is finished? Why not? Even if it often evokes something more formal and easier to define. Can four imprints in dialogue with each other result in one unity? A few people have also used the term “stigma” about the red paintings. But I do prefer the word “tache!”
NL/JD: In the terms of “tache” you seem to find something which allows you to go against the idea of a pre-planned fabrication process.
ALM: My work has nothing to do with a pre-planned fabrication process or a deliberate creation. Painting was a means of exploration which gave me access to a kind of knowledge. On canvas, what you see is closer to presentation than representation, which would be in the realm of images.
NL/JD: The issue of the image doesn’t have any relevance for you?
ALM: In my opinion, an image is a kind of grasping of something exterior to you, of a conscious or unconscious representation. My work depends on a “phenomenon” happening inside of me, caught on canvas at the same time.
NL/JD: Would you define recent art productions as an art of the image?
ALM: The image is fascinating. You can play with it, subvert it, transform it, take it as subject. It’s something very plastic, very malleable. The artists have now become “plasticians!” All these things have morphed into images. But the image has nothing to do with life.
NL/JD: I’d like to return to your relationship to the works that dominate the art world these days. This preeminence of the image that you diagnose is part of a sort of comet trail of Pop Art. You mentioned Abstract Expressionism and the affinities you had with this movement at some point. What was your take on Pop Art, this other important American art movement which followed Abstract Expressionism?
ALM: I don’t have a very original approach to Pop Art. It all seems so dated. Pop Art and some other contemporary artists use society’s codes, and I’m not sure that doing so allows you to move forward. I respect their know-how, their technical abilities, their wit: It’s all very smart. This all sends us back to the effectiveness of the image.
With Pop Art, photo processes became predominant. They allowed for a better mastering of the artwork execution, and provided a greater consensus, but they also kept spontaneity, immediacy, surprise, and vulnerability at bay.
These artists can sometimes be surprised by the result of their work but don’t seem to be overwhelmed by it. They can invent but not discover. In order to discover, you need to reject yourself first, and for that you need to have nothing to lose. I rarely see this kind of mindset in Contemporary Art. Luckily, that field is quite vast. There are works which I’d like to live with and others which I wouldn’t.
NL/JD: What is your relationship to technique in your work?
ALM: I am on the opposite side of technique. My work is about discovery. The issue of technique is what forces you to plan ahead. I am aware that many painters carefully prepare their colors or have read books on painting technique. One day, a friend who works like that told me: “You can never mix green and red.” He had seen that in a book. I never had that kind of relationship to painting, in part because I’ve always used primary colors. There was something childish for me about that. I probably used painting because it was the medium that allowed for the most possibilities. It is a simple medium.
When I started school at the Beaux-Arts, there were no classes dedicated to new technologies. Among the studio choices, there was the photography studio, but it was tiny. The other studios were still mosaic, ceramic, drawing… The new technologies arrived later. If you think of IT, it is a technology which requires planning. You program your image, you use this or that photograph, etc. You are in the finish. The huge problem with technology is that it requires us to plan for a direction. A computer is first and foremost a memory. To start again from scratch, you can’t depend on memory. If you think of the internet, the computer is a means of access to an enormous collective memory, a network of references which you can feed on.
NL/JD: Since you studied sculpture at the Beaux-Arts, you never learned painting?
ALM: I never learned painting and I don’t think you can learn it! For me it seems as absurd as wanting to learn to be a poet.
NL/JD: What did you want to become?
ALM: I don’t think I wanted to become anything in particular, not even a painter. I had to paint, but I also had the impression that everything had been done before. I needed to confront myself with something I could only discover by starting again from scratch.
NL/JD: And to restart from scratch, you needed to erase art history in order to make art?
ALM: Erase art history? No. Instead, I’d say to start again without paying attention to it, while at the same time knowing it — at my level, in order to live my own adventure; and doesn’t an artist always need to put him/herself in question anyway?
NL/JD: You seem to practice an art of forgetting. How does this act of forgetting manifest itself in front of the canvas?
ALM: I am embarrassed when you say that I practice an art of forgetting. I don’t see it that way. I let my thoughts drift until they exhaust themselves. Then a void emerges, and I become a sort of empty receptacle. Only then do I start working on the canvas, in this moment of suspension when all is in tune and becomes one. As I mentioned, paint lays down on the canvas with such clarity, and then Painting appears; it’s all very simple.
installation view of Les grandes rouges at Zürcher Gallery, New York, 2022
Alix Le Méléder was born in 1955 in Boulogne sur Seine, France. She lives in Burgundy and Brittany, France. She studied sculpture at Beaux-Arts, Paris and L'Atelier César from 1974 to 1979. Her work is represented by Zürcher Gallery in New York.
