Painting takes time, as the light that we carry it on.

Alain Tapie.

'To give to see (Donner à voir)'  is the title of a beautiful collection of Eluard.  We see nothing answers with malice Daniel Arasse, the famous french art critic. Thierry Le Saec gives us a lot to see: painting, color, light, space. We see nothing because there is too much to see, because suddenly painting breaks our eyes and finally gives to see the silence. It shows what the music hides in its interstices.

Daniel Kay, 'What the pictures do not know'

Elan Arts: To which contemporary mouvance do you propose to participate ? Who are your friends in the artistic world ?

Thierry Le Saec : First, I am self-taught and I have not attended a training course in a school of Fine Arts.

My training was firstly my library, with a passion to reading all available books and reviews and secondly, my eagerness to attend, as soon as I could, exhibitions. Professionally, I led a Cultural Center for 20 years, and in this framework, established a gallery and a Town artothèque, who was named after Pierre Tal Coat, which I am particularly proud. I have therefore for many years been a curator with programs and exhibitions selections. In paralel, since 1986, I engaged in a personal creative work. All these facets have shaped me artistically so you may well say my training came from my "artist friends", as you mention.

Since 2000, I dedicate myself exclusively to my work. I still today feel the same desire to confront the work of other artists, from today or yesterday. I believe in a continuum of creation. Like yesterday, my library remains an essential source for my work, and not only art books, but also literature and specifically poetry. I realize now that the artists with whom I feel some connections, are often those who have had a very strong experience with books. I think, of course, of Tal Coat, but also to A Tapies, Geneviève Asse, or to stay in the news, as the painter Ràfols Casamada (I have just realized a book of tribute to this artist Ràfols Casamada for Vidal St. Phalle gallery).

I am suspicious of spontaneity, the predominance of affect or gesture. I have to mentally construct the work before I create, and then verify the accuracy of this mental image. It is also what interested me in movements like Support Surface, the Conceptualism and the Minimalism.

To answer your question more specifically, my artistic friends are mostly from the Abstraction, but an abstraction fed with the world. I was also fascinated by Matisse, like many artists, for his work on the color which is in itself a mental space. I admire the artists from "Constructivism", from Malevich to Morellet. In this movement I particularly like the work of Gottfried Honnegger, Aurélie Nemours and Helmut Federle. Of course there are also the artists of the Color Field movement : Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and later Ryman, Brice Marden, David Tremlett, Mangold, James Bishop, who interest me, as almost every painters who come from these movements and who are repesented in France by the great Jean Fournier-Viallat gallery, as Degottex, Hants, Buraglio, Palermo.... That's it, this is my family !

But I still want to clarify that for me this feeling of « mouvance » is not exclusive. I remain curious and open to many other approaches, many other pictorial movements. To paraphrase Tal Coat, we must remain open, available and welcoming. So I am also interested in artists who do not, as Jean-Pierre Pincemin, go where they are expected, and I love this irreverent attitude, on the tightrope in a way ! I believe very strongly that one can love both Ryman and Bazelitz, to take 2 very different artists, with the figuration / abstraction dichotomy. Mouvements allow to classify, but certainly are reductive to the complexity of painting, as with any other form of plastic arts.

To complete this gallery, I just recently discovered, thanks to Jean-Pascal Léger, a German artist who is only little known in France, Jürgen Partenheimer, whith some remarkable series of drawings, filled with all sensory experiences, his travel, his readings. I feel great affinity with his approach. His works transcend reality, to grow and reach the edge of the abyss, where everything is possible, the Imago Ignota.

EA: In your works, you seem to use with equal ease drawing, printmaking, painting : does this mean that your objective is in the representation, not in the medium?

T.L.S. : Yes, for me the medium is a mean, which allows to tell, to paint, to think ... I often hear that such medium would be more "contemporary", and that this other is no longer relevant to describe the world, as it is definitely outdated. This for example what is said in France for painting or engraving. My personal opinion is that this approach is stupid, because the work is not made of his material but with its intention, its idea. The material allows, leads the thought. Therefore, as a visual artist, I propose to use every tools, of all mediums - from pencil to digital image - I discard nothing a priori, as long as it is relevant, with an effective connection with the intention which is developed. The French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard said that traveling is primarily a moral issue, and the tool which is selected must carry this. In this sense, yes the objective is in the representation and not in the medium.

EA: You have made a significant number of artists' books as a drawer or engraver, in collaboration with writers : what is the exact place of literature in your work?

T.L.S. : Literature takes a predominant place. Firstly personal ; because as a teenager, I wrote poems and after a few publications, I finally stopped looking for publishers. In 1989 I learned to engrave with the aim to make artist books, first on my own texts and very quickly in complicity with contemporary writers. The studio work has always been done in parallel with the book. One feeds the other, without any hierarchy. More generally, I also pay an essential interest for works on paper. Drawing is often the sharpest, the most intimate part of a work, like a skeleton that allows the work to stand.

In the artist's book, the illustration or the image (printmaking, painting, photography, digital images or virtual or any other technique) must first participate to a living dialogue with the text. As Yves Peyré rightly puts it 'To see and to read may merge into a single act, a movement of profound cosmogonic vision which embraces two levels of reality, to create a second entity. " (in Y. Peyré, Painting and poetry, a dialogue throough the book. Éditions Gallimard. 2001.)

This dialogue can be done in connivance, with sensuality but it may be rude, violent and disruptive. Image or writing : no winner. What I find fascinating in the artist's book, is looking for this 3rd planet, the true place where the book should lie, in the orbit of neither the painter nor the poet or the writer, an autonomous planet which may claim its own orbit. A creative breach into the privacy of each of the protagonists involved in the book. I followed this idea in my works with those who were willing to accompany me (A. Jégou, A. Beuze, E. Rougé - C. Juliet - B. Christmas - D. Sampiero - Mr. Benhamou - D. Kay - Madézo C - P. Toreilles - Guillevic - L. Degrotte - P. Keineg - J. Gaucheron - P. Magnenat - D. Sallenave-JP Michel ...).

It is difficult to name the singular contribution of this experience in my work, but as a river irrigates, I know it is one of the most important part.

Elandarts.com is pleased to present a selection of 9 of your drawings of your recent series entitled 'De natura rerum': is this the famous poem of Lucretius, as a souvenir of Epicurus, who guided your inspiration?

T.L.S. : I did not work out of the text of Lucretius, and this series is not in the scheme of an artist's book. It revolves around the issue of plant and organic forms of life, from the leaf to the cell. It is only at a late stage in the construction of this important series of drawings (over 180 to date) that the generic title appeared. Indeed, I generally do not title a work (I do not want to lock it into a single definition, and I prefer to give the viewer the freedom to build his own universe), for this series, I felt the accuracy of this title as the thread holds the clothes after laundry, and prevent them from flying.

Now, in retrospect, the poem of Lucretius, which is an attempt to "break the strong locks of nature", and to propose to reveal to the reader the nature of the world and its natural phenomena, can only seduce me. You see, literature and the book, again !

EA: Finally are you looking ataraxia or for some derangement of the senses?

T.L.S. In the course of work, I sincerely do not go through this type of questions, otherwise it would be impossible to continue and, in a epicurean sense, this would prevent from any peace of mind. However, any real work must strive to free oneself from the burden of superstition, and must participate in the liberation of all of us. Very openly, I think that there can be no real freedom without art, as it is the substance, the smuggler, the glue that binds us all, beyond time and contingencies. From the Lasceau Caberns to Picasso's Minotaur, art reminds us that we are all from this world, on this small fragile planet, lost in the cosmos, but irrevocably united in a common pot.

So neither ataraxia nor disruption of the senses, each enclosing the creative act into too narrow definitions, but perhaps both at once. In a text on my work, the critic Maurice Benhamou says: « Over the works of Thierry Le Saec, a search of silence, withdrawal in the heart of things, to almost nothing - or nothing. No, no nothing. Everything in nothing. An aesthetics of presence. »

In conclusion, I quote a short text I wrote some years ago for a catalog:

To be in poverty, waiting and looking deeper the world, that we carry and that surrounds us. (...)
To be as much in the question as in the answer, and try repeatedly a lucid cross over appearances.

Interviewed on 16 June 2009, Languidic