Setback
In postmodernity, time has been subjected to the accelerated rythm of life, it is hurried and repetitive, and passes without leaving a trace. Time devoid of meaning has affects on our environmnet : spaces have been reduced, and stripped of thier particularity. Geographical coordinates dissolve, homologate, and specific places are substituted by replaceable, modular, and non-essential spaces, in short, «non-places ». This « non-place » also signifies that there is nothing that occurs in any given space. The scenes painted by Blaise Schwartz, are marked by a slowing or pausing of time : they are less about specific actions and more about the moments leading up to, or following them. In other words, they are not anchored in any specific context (historical or spatial) and as such, they do not deliver a narrative but rather the prerequisite or framework for one. The decor and figures conjured by the artist may bring to mind characteristics of fantastic novels of the 19th century, particularly the supernaturalism of Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. Firstly, because these paintings are realistic, however strange and frenetic. And secondly, because, through excluding the representation of an event in its paroxysmal form, the paintings bring us to question time itself, as mentioned above, in stark contrast to linear time, we find something closer to a distortion of time, a bug, or some kind of anomaly beyond our control.
In the works of Blaise Schwartz, we are dealing with the illustration of stories more than of history in its anachronistic form. Dark passages, dormant waters, and hermetic abbreviations are the pictorial means used by the artist to bring beings and objects together in a psychedelic space that are normally distanced on the scale of the ‘Grand Narrative’. In addition, through his work, he raises questions about the act of painting, notably with the recurrence of bats and snails, two animals that are as easily identifiable unfurled as they are abstract and geometric in their folded form; in fact, they are two elements that embody several aspects of painting itself. Associated with a phobic subconscious, these beings provide clues to the dreamlike quality of the artist’s imagery, again further exaggerated by the restriction of space and overall physical incoherence. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi (1959) refers to Imaginary Prisons (In italian, the ‘ Carceri d’Invenzione’, 1745-1760) of the eponymous artist as being a «fictitious world, and yet ominously real, claustrophobic, yet megalomaniac» which «is not without reminding us of the one in which modern humanity locks itself more each day, whose mortal dangers we are beginning to recognize». The same is true for the painting of Blaise Schwartz, which draws between archeology (past) and imagination (future) enough to lend a constituted image to a fictional narrative, which would be impossible to create with anything but pictorial means. The bright yellow blocks are the only visual elements that tie these paintings together, while simultaneously emphasizing their artificiality. Above all, these yellow blocks are used to build impossible architectures. Beneath the tiles, which lead nowhere, black silt stirs, and a symbiotic vision of species becomes apparent, aquatic or terrestrial passages reveal themselves and engulf the viewer’s gaze, somewhere between the physiocratic theory and a parody of the theory of evolution.
2022