Now on sale
Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Email article | 
Digg it | 
del.icio.us |
Print article
Untitled, 2001, acrylic on canvas , 59×39 3/8”. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York.
As the following interview was under-going final edit, I came across this statement: “To experience the same thing twice puts the first under erasure and makes the second redundant. It creates a preclusion of hierarchy.” It is from an essay by Meg O’Rourke on Roni Horn, but it also succinctly expresses the phenomenon at work in the paintings of Bernard Piffaretti. For nearly two decades, Piffaretti has been dividing his canvas with a vertical line, painting an abstract image on one half and then copying it onto the other. The left half does not necessarily constitute the original; he might just as well begin on the right. Piffaretti started working with this highly recognizable method in the heyday of simulationism, but his duplication involves not the painting as copy but the copy as painting.
I had seen a number of Piffaretti’s paintings in Paris, where I had detected a congruity between the French conception of the building facade and the contemporary French painters’ conception of the picture plane. As I met more artists there, I was introduced to the term tableau: the character or complexion of a given time. The word carried historical and political meaning and simultaneously indicated the resolved picture. The idea of the “fully achieved painting” goes back to the pre-Revolution Academy and is associated with authoritarianism. The contemporary French painters aimed to disrupt this convention: the Support/Surface group of artists from the late ’60s and early ’70s, for example, dismantled paintings, burned holes in them, and rolled them up to indicate political resistance to authority as much as to whimsically advance certain Greenbergian ideas about the integrity of the picture plane. This interview, a conversation complemented by a subsequent email exchange, reflects on the tableau as a site of transition and continuity.
I find Piffaretti to be our most important contemporary painter. The work manages to retain the full-body experience, both physical and retinal, of standing in front of a painting, while it demonstrates the ways in which the force of history provides an entrance for the seemingly infinite replication of itself. Piffaretti’s work unites those great opposites of twentieth-century French modernism, Duchamp and Matisse: it is decorative painting in the service of the mind.
