ISABELLE BONZOM

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ERIC FISCHL & ISABELLE BONZOM

Eric Fischl is known in France for his disturbing erotic scenes painted with vigor. But he is also a sculptor. His art deals with the human body in its tonicity and fragility.

At the Templon Gallery in Paris, from April 29 to June 13, 2009, this American artist presented « Ten Breaths », a group of sculptures which includes « Tumbling Woman » created as a tribute to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. That sculpture was first exhibited in 2002 at the Rockfeller Center in New York City, but was quickly withdrawn from view. This rejection left a profound mark on Eric Fischl.

Isabelle Bonzom, painter and art historian, has a long conversation with Eric Fischl. A part of this conversation was published by the French website CultureCie in Spring 2009 at the occasion of his Parisian show.

First part of this conversation :

"The breath and the touch"

Isabelle Bonzom - "Ten breaths" seems to be an installation of different sculptures.

Eric Fischl - I think of them as an installation. The space it was originally designed to be seen in is in Hannover, Germany. I showed it at Mary Boone Gallery in NYC and that space required some rethinking of the compositions. I am now going to show it in Paris at Templon Gallery and that will be a new experience as well.

IB - I'm very interested by the fact that "Tumbling woman" is not so big, directly on the ground, rather fragile. There is the possiblity that the viewer could stumble. Do you like the idea that the spectator could be physically involved into your sculpture?

EF – This "Tumbling Woman ll" is smaller than the original and yes, it is meant to be on the floor. I love the vulnerability of her and her precarious balance. I also love the rusted burnt color. It is a very tragic figure as it was a very tragic event.

IB - "Tumbling woman" could be a dancer as well. She is so tonic. I love this mixture of tragic drama, vulnerability and strong energy. During this Spring 2009, in Europe, you are exhibiting paintings in Berlin and sculptures in Paris. How was the choice of theme and technique been made for the Parisian exhibition?

EF - There is a great tradition of sculpture and passionate sculpture in France. I wanted my "Ten Breaths" to be seen against the backdrop of this great history. In the context of this great tradition one will be able to measure how contemporary are my sculptures.

IB - Is Rodin part of your pantheon?

EF - Yes, Rodin is a very important figure that all who are serious about using the body, the flesh and muscle of the body, to powerfully express emotions must contend with Rodin. He was the last great sculptor of flesh and blood.

IB - Who are the artists who have preceded you and who nourish you the most, in your work as a painter and a sculptor ?

EF - There are many and they change as I do. In my pantheon are artists such as Michaelangelo, Donatello, Caravaggio, Goya, Velasquez, Manet, Degas, Bonnard, Beckmann. There are so many more whose work I admire and respect. My list is long.

IB – Edward Hopper seems to be important to you, also. In 2007, you appeared in a documentary that was presented along with the Hopper retrospective shown in the US. There are indeed iconographic links between his painting and yours. What do you think of his art?

EF - Hopper is an enigma. I think most painters agree that he is not a brilliant painter but he is a brilliant artist. How could that be? There is a level of discomfort with the way he handles the relationship between what is "seen" and what is "felt" and most importantly what can be "expressed". The construction of his scenes are highly abstracted, and highly codified/ abbreviated. His work relates more to theater than to cinema. He manages to turn the aspects of daily routine ( i.e. cutting the grass, reading a newspaper, eating at a restaurant) into moments of great meaning and significance. His work is constantly revealing to us the abyss which envelopes our lives. He contrasts that spiritual emptiness, the darkness of our isolation, with the most glorious light! The contrasts in his work are so extreme one must marvel at how he can contain them.

IB - You says that “he is not a brilliant painter but he is a brilliant artist”. However, as far as his technique, is he not, at least, a brilliant colorist and compositionist ?

EF - It is very direct and unsophisticated. Yes, he is absolutely brilliant with his light and the intelligence of his composition. The eroticism in Hopper's work is mostly expressed through the pleasure of his luxurious light and his use of color. Though he does from time to time paint scenes of couples or voluptuous women these scenes are voyeuristic and fraught with sexual tension. It is a complex moment. One that is not free of self-consciousness. For this reason I do not think of them as erotic. Certainly not when compared with someone like Matisse. In this regard, I feel close to Hopper. I, too, use sex as a currency of exchange that sets up a particular dynamic between people. It is in that exchange that one can see both what one wants and what one needs and how big is the void between them.

IB - In France, some of my colleagues, whether art historians, critics or artists, believe that painting is dead; I don't agree with them. For you, is painting a dead thing? 

EF - You cannot ask a painter if painting is dead. You can ask that only of people who don't know how to make a painting come alive. And if they cannot breathe life into a canvas, is that the fault of painting? No. It is because they are lousy artists.

IB - In view of the development of technical images, what is the role, in your opinion, of painting in our society?

EF - Each medium has its own way of delivering meaning and experience. Each medium has its own time to develop and transmit the experience the artist wants to communicate. Painting is a slower medium than photography. It "captures" a different aspect of reality. Photography does not express memory. It can become the way something gets remembered but it cannot re-present a recalled experience with the same force and complexity as a painting. 

Anyone who believes painting is no longer useful also believes that memory is no longer useful.

Another distinction between painting and other mediums is the degree to which painting can monumentalize those things which we hold dear to us and make meaningful in our lives.

IB - There is a stimulating paradox that I see in your art, and that is the contrast between your painting and your sculpture. It seems that your painting expresses  more vividness and a sort of Rablaisian vision, while your sculpture seems more dramatic. Is sculpture the other side of your art?

EF - Sculpture uses a different part of my creative brain, one that cannot be directly accessed through my eyes. If painting is a process whereby the hand follows what the eye sees, then sculpture is its reverse: the eye follows what the hand feels. The hands have so much stored memory that is not easily accessed except through touch.

IB - Do you see your painting and your sculpture as a mixture of motion and emotion? 

EF - Yes but can't elaborate.

Eric Fischl " Krefeld Project: Sun Room Scene 1" 2002 - oil/canvas - 198 x 305 cm - 78 x 120 in.

IB - Expression of movement is recurrent in your art. In painting, some bodies are nearly falling down from a chair or a bed, It's more obvious in watercolors and sculptures. A sensation of precariousness appears during the last decade, would you like to talk about this?

EF - One of the many things that I have gotten from photography is movement.  Photography captures such a thin slice of a moment that it almost always captures people in transition. Transition means that a person is moving from one stable or balanced moment to another and in that space between there is imbalance. Imbalance captures motion and emotion and that is what I am most excited by.

IB - In what you have painted from the eighties until now, there is a tendency towards a sense of drama. From hedonistic sensualism to sensual dramatization, from darkness to light, in the paintings especially: great and stimulating paradoxe. It seems that step by step, through the years, your painting has shed different things to go towards a rich paradox of tension, maturity and vividness. Do you agree with this? How do you experience or live that phenomenon?

EF - As I've grown older, the world has become more complex and, at the same time, less urgent.  I do not ask my paintings to be about the same things that I asked them when I was much younger. The more complex the experience, the more need for subtlety. As a principal of narrative painting, I stop the action within the drama at the moment before something happens. Or I stop it right after something has happened. It is the moments before or right after that are the most dramatic and most inclusive of the audience. Because the event is still open-ended, the viewers project their own feelings, memories, anxieties and desires. The viewer possesses the moment and its meaning.

IB - As a viewer of your painting, I feel a carnal, fleshy atmosphere. Not fleshy in a negative way, but in a very positive and vivid way. It seems that it is very important for you. At the beginning, was it in reaction to a puritan behavior in American society? It seems that it is a sort of theatrical ( grotesque like) vision about our human condition, isn't it?

EF - For me, the body is the big question mark (?). What is it and what is it in relation to who I believe I am and who you are? Does what my body need reflect what I need? How does our feelings of vulnerability distort the way we perceive the world around us? Can we socialize the needs of our bodies in a healthy way? The relationship between the body and the person is riveting to watch. You can tell through body-language how comfortable or insecure a person is with themselves and with others. Body-language is like a window to the soul. This is what I try to capture in my work.

IB - I'm very fond of the way you play with color. Are you interested in the way that two or three colours together can produce a sort of vibrant reaction in your eye and the eye of the viewer?

EF - I use color to develop the light in my paintings. Light is an essential quality in my work. I use light as "illumination". It is how meaning is cast. It is how truth is revealed. Light is everything.

IB - What is the question about your work that you would like to answer and which you have never been asked ?

EF - To answer your final question, which of course is the most difficult one, my answer is this ; Why do I care? This is not a response to being asked the question. This is the question I ask myself all the time. Why do I care? Why do I care about anything? Is my caring a weakness, a strength, a neurosis, a vision? Is caring important, and if so, why?

Second part of this conversation, first published by CultureCie :

"Dreamt shadows, real shadows"

Isabelle Bonzom - What I really experienced through the installation at Templon's is how you play tremendously with cast shadows, I knew that but, at the opening, for me it was a real and good experience. 

Eric Fischl - The title, Ten Breaths, came to me in a dream. Someone had suggested to me to make a title using the word "tenebrae" because of the shadows. That night I dreamt that the work was titled Ten Breaths which is almost an anagram of tenebrae. Ten Breaths title inspires projection because in the original installation there were 13 figures which means that 3 figures were not breathing. It is also how we count down to the start or completion of some big event: ten, nine, eight ..... etc. The shadows are a very necessary and important part of Ten Breaths. It is the animating factor that also brings the moment into the "other-worldliness". They create a cacophony of motion and urgency. I was thinking of moments like the bombing of the World Trade Towers, the flooding of New Orleans, the car bombings in Baghdad or Gaza. Tragedies all. I was also thinking about the contrast between the dire scenes like "Damage" and "Samaritan" and " Tumbling Woman ll" and the dancing in "Congress of Wits". The contrast is so extreme, how can anyone be celebrating when such pain and destruction are taking place? It must be the end of the world where nothing makes sense nor matters. "The Congress of Wits" is a Greek chorus. Their energy is madness. One can see when one looks at Modernism that shadows had slowly been taken out of the art, not only the art, but also our lives, our homes and cities, our religions and our dreams. When electricity became such a fixture of our lives we used it to shine light into every crevice, every doorway and alley. We turned night into day. The modernist adherence to the essential truth of painting, which is its flatness, could not tolerate shadows because shadows create depth, create illusion. But what have we given up by denying the existence of the shadow world?

I.B - When I was a teenager, I was really moved by Leon Spilliaert or Rembrandt 's drawings where the shadows are sharpely designed and where the drawing become a painting, thanks to the ink matter and the vivid strockes. Ditto, in oil, with Caravaggio or Artemisia Gentileschi.

E.F - What is so wonderful about Baroque painting is its overwhelming darkness. Modernism can be reduced on some levels to the denial of death. Our ideas about progress have on certain levels to be about hope for eternal life; a deathless life, a painless life, a life made better through chemistry and made easier by machinery.

I.B - In the first part of our conversation, you talk about "illumination" which is a strong term. Is there a symbolic or metaphoric aspect in your way to use shadow, in your paintings and in the installation of your sculptures?

E.F - It is in the darkness that our fears, our demons and destroyers lurk. It is in the shadows that an important part of our brains becomes active, where fantasy takes over and all that makes us feel certain and secure gives way to uncertainty and prayer. It is in the shadow world we become strong for it is here we must use our wits to survive. Shadows are the half-world. They are memory and projection. It is the shadow that reminds us of death.

Specialist of Eric Fischl's art, Isabelle Bonzom also authored the essay 

“Ten Breaths, a place for experiment and a return to the origins".

She has commented his work several times, notably during her lectures "Off with their heads!" , at the New York Academy of Art, 

and "Delicious Gravity" , at the occasion of the group show "Jouvences "( Jubilations) at the Château d'Ardelay, in France.

Eric Fischl also wrote an essay on Isabelle Bonzom's painting, "Entre nous", published in the catalogue "Traverses".

Eric Fischl's official website

Translation: Isabelle and Marie-Christine Bonzom and Catherine Stearns. 

Many thanks to Eric Fischl, to Catherine Stearns, to Marie-Christine Bonzom, journalist, correspondent in Washington DC, to Axelle Emden, CultureCie news editor, and to the Galerie Templon