By Pierre Legrand
18th February to 5th March 2022
Monday to Saturday 10am-12pm & 3pm-5pm
Opening on Friday 18th February 2022 at 4pm
For the last forty years, I have been doing almost the same painting, trying to catch the vibration of a pivotal experience which occurred forty years ago, and set the direction of my work and explorations. This experience asserts itself again and again bringing each time new thresholds – the same, but with infinitesimal variations in order to come closer and closer with the hope to get back the light, the space and the exhilaration of the original experience
Almost from the beginning, I have felt the need to discard usual canvas for porous material: unprimed fabric, meshes of different kind, etc. As a result, very often I found the back of the painting more “interesting” than the front.
Once I left my paintings to a French gallery, leaving her the trouble of installation but when I came for the opening I found out that all the works were shown back front…
The same problem remained all these years until a few days ago Anu told me, why don’t you show both sides? Of course, I immediately discarded the idea but it remained, as I kept looking more and more at both sides
So here they are: the last series, unashamed to show their back.
They are no longer painted surfaces they have a back and a front. They show something and its opposite, containing the totality. Imagine, in every conflict to be able to see simultaneously the two sides of the situation. Does this new series have a political content?
While preparing this expo, two texts echoed through the space-time of my research.
One by Sri Aurobindo in the Secret of the Vedas:
“The activity of the pure illuminated intelligence is sustained and increased by the conscious expression in us of the delight in divine existence and divine activity typified by the Soma wine. As the intelligence feeds upon it, its action becomes an intoxicated ecstasy of inspiration by which the rays come pouring abundantly and joyously in. Light giving indeed is the intoxication of thee in thy rapture”
And this one by Derek Walcott:
“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer, I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation…the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the “I” not being important… ultimately it is what Yeats says “ such a sweetness flows into the breast and we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed”
Will my painting one day, land on that shore?
Pierre Legrand
24th January, 2022