MEMORIES
I have been painting memory for 15 years...
Memory of places, which I already approached at the Beaux-arts (Série Résonance), then my work on Les Clous and the long series “Mémoire-peau”.
After having produced a series of large realistic, expressionist formats (Les épouvantails) at the end of 2017, which reflect the memory of our time, an absolute necessity was then imposed. A simplification. The abandonment of the line, of the expression of the figure, of the image. Translate not the form, but the pure matter, the sensations, the passages, colors, blacks, and let the light do the rest.
In fact, painting memory today is what remains in me of this figurative time, which fades and transforms into a simple impression, until it becomes a sensation, an abstraction.
Our memory records special moments, attached to certain places, to certain perfumes, the memory of people who have disappeared... impalpable traces of past moments, furtive, or intimate indelible scars.
Unfortunately, our memory does not retain these moments definitively.
Inevitably, they fade, disintegrate, fade and disappear...
In my work, Abstract, Black Lights and Glass Lights, immersed in these perceptions, I try to fix the blurred emotions of these secret, tragic or happy moments, of these precious moments.
I try to translate in ABSTRACT, the colorful, ''audible'', rather happy impressions.
With LUMIERES NOIRES furrows, the lake, and LUMIERES DE VERRE, like an archaeologist, I explore and scratch surfaces, to update these past moments, (re) discover memories.
I freeze these traces, these scars, certain rhythmic or slow, precise or uncertain sensations. I travel the paths of this complex labyrinth which drown in the Immense expanse of matter of the black lake of memory. Find themselves in convolutions, light or superimposed, furrows on canvas, or in the false transparency of glass, revealed, splashed by the changing light or closing in the heavy darkness of oblivion.
Everything contributes to these perceptions. Gloss or dullness, colors and blacks, smooth and relief, oil or wax, light canvas, hard and rigid wood panel, or on glass. Alchemy between these different thick and colored materials, aggregates of bone or iron blacks, mixed with cooked or black oils, heady essences of aspic, turpentine, or wax.
But the material can then no longer be passed only with simple paintbrushes or brushes. We can no longer paint the same way. This new questioning forces us to reinvent everything. Create your own tools (Scrapers, scrapers, metal blade, plexi cut on aluminum, brushes, etc.). Divert others (threshold bar, tiler squeegee, flat metal rulers, …) …
But I remain a polymorphous painter, continuing my research on memory and matter. In this vast field of abstractions, I perpetuate old techniques in my contemporary painting, to keep the knowledge, the traces of our illustrious ancestors, and allow a real durability to my work.
Memory plays tricks on us...
Like her, the light reveals, by changing reflections, my memories which then slip into these formed streaks, these traces or scars. According to this capricious or subdued light, the imprint of the past then appears, disappears, or fades away, closing access to my (your) story.
Serge Teneze,