Foreword by Philippe Dagen
The first word that comes to mind is singularity. An absolute singularity. The work of Alix Le Méléder does not belong in any movement. It stands apart, irreducibly apart. It could be best defined, perhaps, by a line from Mallarmé’s ‘Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’:
‘Calm block fallen among us here from some dark disaster’.
Regarding the ‘disaster’, suffice it to say that the need to paint made itself felt during the artist’s adolescence, as the means to avoid becoming enclosed in silence. ‘It was’, she says, ‘a language problem. I had no means of communication, and because of that – thanks to that – I turned to painting, although at first I knew nothing about it.’
‘Block’: this short, hard word bespeaks the unity of this oeuvre which is both upright and off on one side. Given the opportunity to see together canvases made several years apart, that unity is undeniable. It is founded on a number of compositional principles: composition in blotches and touches of colour on a white surface (canvas or paper), which remains visible throughout, leaving visible the accidents of execution, splashes or slight drips; a preference for intense, luminous colours; using these in different densities, from quasi-transparent to opaque.
The unity is also negative: what Le Méléder’s painting is not. It is not figurative. There is thus no reason to expect it to offer a narrative, not even a hint of one, or a symbol, even elliptically. But while it is abstract, its abstraction does not conform to the systems that have defined abstraction since the turn of the twentieth century and, more assertively and publicly, since the Second World War. These systems are divided between the gestural and the geometrical, the former justified by the more or less exalted expression of the self, of its emotions and drives, the latter drawn towards an ideal of absolute equilibrium, of perfection of line and angle. North American minimalism, which emerged in the 1960s, together with its European variants, represents the last historical form of this idealism, whose concern for purity could go all the way to puritanism.
Le Méléder belongs in neither category. It would seem that she never engaged with orthogonal geometry The same cannot be said of the gestural choreography characteristic of abstract expressionism. In the early 1990s, she painted in long, fluid touches and in layered, crisscrossing rubbings. These cover almost the whole surface, in all-over fashion. Her painting at this time was fairly close to Joan Mitchell’s, which gives an idea of its quality. But, far from being satisfied with this, Le Méléder was quick to move away. At Galerie Jean Fournier in 1995, she presented chromatic architectures stretching over white, which can be perceived as the void. No more all-over. Light or denser patches, filaments, vertical or horizontal drips. An architectonics of colour, constructions. Hence, to come back to Mallarmé, that sensation of ‘calm’: the ‘calm’ of a resolution.
This was affirmed in 1995 and from then on never weakened, until the artist decided that she had taken the experience as far as she could and that there was no longer any reason to continue – in which she showed the kind of artistic and ethical rigour that is beyond many artists stuck in the rut of production and repetition.
The word experience seem apt here insofar as, viewing Le Méléder’s work today, it appears possible to define it as a testing of the capacities of painting unaffiliated with any of the different known forms of abstraction. In the course of her work, she came upon a principle of composition. This was first evident in the exhibition at La Maison Chailloux in Fresnes, in 1998: the touches of colour, which hitherto moved in every direction, were now gathered in four zones, two with touches tending to the horizontal, running parallel, and two with parallel touches tending to the vertical. The centre was empty. This emptiness grew and, over the years, pushed the colours back to the point where these are superimposed and constitute only four oblong or oval forms, positioned near the edges of the square canvas, either towards the middle of the side, or closer to the corners. Usually, on the edges of each form, it is possible to see the colours that have been successively applied, right up to the latest. This process excludes any kind of hasty gesturality. But, conversely, the irregularity of the forms and the shifting of the colours are incompatible with any ideas of geometric rigour or monochrome.
Her work is thus constituted by a sequence of hypotheses. Here are some of them: dispersion and structure are not incompatible; nor are dynamism and balance; the format can be that of a sheet of paper, or that of a canvas with sides of two metres; it is just as possible to have simply one dominant colour – red – as to allow numerous shades, with none ruled out.
The white canvas is the free space in which Le Méléder advances, alone: and seeks, renewing the attempt with each canvas. ‘To move towards the unknown, that is what I wanted’, she says.