Back and forth
Blaise Schwartz's paintings, despite the narratives they superimpose, in dense or looser meshes, appear to be singularly silent. Perhaps this is because of the spaces he conjures up for them, places that are 'other', on the margins: the deck of a boat, deserted quaysides on the Seine, docks where containers are displayed... So many utilitarian places, fitted out for the human body, but where the latter is invariably absent; in Blaise Schwartz's representations, a geography of solitary wandering emerges.
Quite often, different layers accumulate on the surface of his paintings, in which the initial motif intersects with other, more abstract backgrounds. In his highly structured stagings, the intermingling of representations, figurative or otherwise, inevitably provokes a certain dispersion, where the eye keeps going back and forth, without necessarily being able to link the different spaces to familiar places. Stripped of all exoticism, Blaise Schwartz's mineral landscapes appear as reflective, melancholy forms.
And when the human figure reappears, it is watermarked, barely delineated: solitary swimmers, biffins with their faces lowered to the ground, or an adolescent figure, perhaps asleep, leaning against a wall, her rucksack at her feet. Opposed to any form of authoritarianism, Blaise Schwartz's painting is, as he puts it, constructed intuitively, leafing through page after page. There is no dilution, however, apart from that of oil: in the space of the canvas, and even if the imagination takes flight, everything holds together firmly.
2016