Chrysalisis
Xavier Bourgine
The chrysalis paintings (Les chrysalides) by Blaise Schwartz are plunged in shadow, only certain strange yellow surfaces produce a glimmer of light. They have been colonized by bats, hanging from walls and shelves. They observe us, or perhaps dream hidden behind their chrysalis wings. Questions arise from this confrontation, where up and down are inversed: do the bats see the world upside down when they hang head down? Is it not the observer who sees upside down from their human perspective?
Something outside of the painting’s edges makes the compositions expand, pulling with it the constituent elements, spreading them out towards something unknown wide by an omnipresent body of water. Terrestrial globes roll or float, and clouds drift beyond the edge of the canvas, they are no more contained in the paintings than the bats and monkeys that coexist in the same world. Each element has been carefully selected for a migratory, zoonotic, or overall transitory character: the figures of monkeys, that are present in a few paintings, bring to mind the dissimulated ape in the ‘Dying Slave’ of Michael Angelo as a human in the making.
The construction of space itself is contaminated by this movement. Perspective, the culmination of a Western, scientific, and political vision of reality (Arasse clearly demonstrates that it addresses the subject appearing as both an individual and an observer), distorted in the 20th century, continues its metamorphoses. The infinite vanishing point, as the promise of a mature subject, is no longer present here more than as a shadow of a ghost, as if abandoning the belief in a final stage of progress or evolution.
Just as bats become chrysalises, other objects populating these canvases suffer the impossibility of reaching their imago, a term that in zoology, designates the final stage of an individual’s development. The adult becomes the “image” of a species, its model in the imagination as well as its completion. However, in these paintings, the unfinished is in everything. The bare, glowing skin of bat wings, and the glimpse of fingers escaping from a box, are hints of a fragmented human.
Humanity is in fact present, but caught up in a process of dehumanization, a kind of glitch where spaces and objects have become figures, actors or inhabitants.
The smooth touch brushes away any affect, and creates a sort of distancing in which any seemingly known object, as materialized in this pictorial world (only a fragment of our own) becomes ambiguous, unnamable. Blaise Schwartz’s paintings express the latent temporal qualities of the chrysalis, where the imago incubates.
2022