Three years, and sometimes more
This is the lifespan of a large loach snail in the wild, the small gray burgundy easily reaching five to ten years in captivity. Four days: this is the duration of Blaise Schwartz’s exhibition, offered on rue Quincampoix (June 15 to 18, 2023) by the new Ad Astra Galerie, curated by Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin. Multimillennial is the title, the plural of which invites us to consider that the living or geological phenomena represented are multimillennial. Certainly, the snail, the monkey or the bat which inhabit the webs, hermaphrodite or hybrid animals, sometimes perceived as intermediaries before man, are not each multi-millennial, but their species, just like ours, are.
While contemporary figuration, for two or three years widely exhibited and publicized, playing on a very French story of a «return» to oil painting (which has in reality never ceased to be, in attested by artists like Jean Le Gac or Sam Szafran as well as the work of Benjamin Olivennes, L’autre art contemporain), is marked by a very strong human presence, Blaise Schwartz evacuates humanity, or at least fragments it. Absent but present, like the deus absconditus of the Jansenists, it shapes the universe in its image and on its scale, and for good reason…
How then can we attempt to give the world and species a representation outside of the human, spatial and temporal structures of representation? There has been no shortage of attempts of this kind, often imbued with scientificity or science fiction, all in distorting ways. When Kupka represents in the Illustration of February 20, 1909, the beginnings of humanity – The inhabitant of the Chapelle-aux-Saints cave, in the Mousterian era, he offers a simian and primitive vision of man from Neanderthal, which already exaggerates the first scientific conclusions.
It is perhaps through the medium of the snail that Blaise Schwartz achieves, by detaching himself from the concern for verisimilitude, a more accurate evocation. We remember Arasse interpreting in Francesco del Cossa’s The Annunciation the presence of a disproportionate snail as a symbolic pivot indicating to the viewer that the scene playing out in the image belongs to another order of reality than his world. Likewise here, the snail, sometimes as large as continents, invites transmutations of scale and time. A folded snail is like a mineral sphere, a small planet. The slowness of the animal, which drools as the painter spreads thin layers of paint on the canvas, also evokes the idea of a long time.
Other elements fuel this representation, which is all the more multi-millennial in that it is intended to be outside of time. On certain canvases, we thus find terrestrial views reinventing previous stages of plate drift, reinventing because these are not copied according to scientific projections. Screws and drops of water sometimes parasitize the images, further confusing the microcosm and the macrocosm. By superimposing fragments and different scales, Blaise Schwartz shows us the depth of time.
2023