Alain Diot's words

collected by Pascale Bourret

Alain's studio, St Maximin ; December 1999/January 2000

Pascale B : The reflection occurring in our Association intend to investigate three words, three problems: fragility, creativity, solidarity. Fragility is the first issue, the starting point. Our Japanese friends tell us that earthquake gave them a sense of fragility. They learned that things but also our minds, emotions and lives were so fragile. On our side (AKF) we underlined that fragility is a more common condition, not only linked to events like earthquakes. Fragility is everywhere, and will ever be somewhere in the world. Let start from this issue. Could you say how in your painter work, you feel, you see this fragility inherent to life, and how you connect it to your work ? And, in a larger view, how do you conceive the relationship between art and fragility ?

Alain D : I think that I did not wait for this earthquake for understanding how life is both strong, fragile, and ephemeral. First, I think that living is living with fragility. The relationship between painting and life express this fragility. As to the relationships we could have inside AK , indeed the earthquake leads us to remember and to react to fragilities, either intellectual, artistic or physical. This keeps with a social ethics. I think that for the sake of solidarity, creations from AK should be more specific and would have to take in account the fact that thousand of people in Kobe are still homeless. We have to stress, to carry on and to share spaces of thinking as we began to do in small workshops. We have to find and to try to say why we belong to AK, what keeps us together. For me it is the desire to live and to create for these people who don't have anymore the means of doing it, who suffered from the earthquake and from the law of men who make systems. That's my opinion, but the associations AKF and AKJ- have to claim it.

PB. You said that life and fragility go together. Do you mean that you have, as an artist , to express such a fragility? And how? By which means ?

AD. Of course there may be strength involved in the way you express fragility. The point is not what you feel, but what you do of it. That is what you have to deal with, both as human being and as an artist. Works that touch me are the ones where I can find something about human beings.
Where are exactly the limits of nature, its beginning and its end? I don't know. Who said that nothing is more misleading than nature? Rousseau? That seems me particularly right.
What is my way of showing? Is it a spectacular one or just a scarcely one?
Is it a centred view or not? What is the connection between it and the various things that I once perceived, read or heard? Is it, as it were, shifted, moved, almost faded? My work as a painter wake up my memories, there are things coming back, things that I was unable to link together, for which there was no way, and sometimes, suddenly, as I am working, something else works too. There are much similarities and echoes in life. I can see spaces composed of things which are resounding together, and that I am not for myself necessarily able to connect together. Gradually, I try to find a way of connecting them, but they appear to me through such a complexity, that I tell me: lost! I'm absolutely lost!

PB. Your work goes on when you get into a standing point that doesn't rest only on knowing or knowing-how, but also on a lack, on what can only be unexpected. Such a position is in itself fragile, and yet you find in it the mainspring of your work.

AD. I have to live in something which is shifting, or drifting. The right word is "journey". That is for me the deepest meaning of journey: in the journey of your life, you meet opportunities for grasping the word, as if you have continuously to learn reading. There is a time where the problem is of relocating something which is life itself, and finding its only way in disorder, perhaps in perdition. I am working on a thing that I am, and that I try to restore without the perspective of an end. That's the Giacometti's point: "a painting, you can't be done with it!" But the way I am in life doesn't consist in what I say. The way I am consists in what I do. And I am not ever aware of what I am doing. That is also what relates life and fragility. I use to say that in what we call "visual arts", there is something blind. It's a work of life, and it's a blind work: I don't see ever what I am doing. What is important for me is not to manage this kind of things, but to work with them. That's the meaning of life's journey.

PB. You don't know what you are doing, and in your paintings, in the first time, very often, we don't know what we are seeing. Specially in your big ones in grey and white, where grey patches are very light. Eye is caught by these grey spaces, we can see some forms, then we understand than we are dealing with others forms, then we can see that these grey forms allow white forms to exist, and gradually everything takes its place, as if we were reconstructing the painting. But in fact we are rather dealing with several possible paintings.

AD. Complexity stems from the whole of possible readings. While I am reading that or that, I am also reading that or that, and so on. In my work, I am questioning on seeing. What do I see? In a set of possible readings, the question is to articulate this impossibility that we call life by means of painting, but also through my own ideas' story. We might talk in terms of pictures. In any picture, there is something that I never saw. Sometimes, I can feel it, but I don't see it, something not abstract, but standing between figurative and non-figurative. In some sense, I am showing what escapes from our eyes. But we can read. Children are able to read in leaves, in barks, or in clouds. Later we loose such a capacity. I don't know whether we have to maintain it or not. It's both a chance and a danger, because in everyday life, it is difficult to stand close to absent-mindedness. What is difficult for me is this deep meaning of simultaneity and paradox. We may see in it the weight of things: I don't know everything, and I never met people who are acquainted with everything. But suppose somebody disclose to me something, only a little piece, a bit of something, then in my own work I venture a little more. Gilles Deleuze disclosed to me the "too much's space". I find it extraordinary that there may be people who are able to think of such a thing as "too much", because we realize that we are living in this space, the space of "too much". Language do appears in this space, but this language, I only heard very late in the evening, in pubs, or in the words of poets, or in elaborated thinking. It belongs for me to the big work of life, in the space of disappearance and perdition too, in the light of what is binding life and death.

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