Well aware of how works of art are received and how they gain acceptance in the art world, Stéphane Belzère steadily resists new trends. He continues to paint in light of an historical and cultural tradition that's rooted in his personal history.
Two artist friends of mine, a couple, spoke to me one day about Stéphane Belzère. They described him as a painter busy looking after the house he inherited from his parents, who were also both painters. My friends invited me to visit Stéphane and his house. On a quiet grey Sunday, we took the train out to Cormeilles-en-Parisis. I found Stéphane waiting for us on the threshold of his doorstep. We entered a living room entirely wallpapered with flowers and furnished in a 19th century style with glass cabinets filled with trinkets. Plaster casts of feet and forearms that were used for anatomical study hung from hooks on the wall like boxing gloves.
Belzère was born into an artistic family. In this house, among other weekend activities, he would varnish his father's canvases and sort out the barrels of pigments in the cellar. For his mother, the painter Suzanne Lopata, he would print lithographs in the studio that had been set up at the back of the house. Other painters and friends of the family would regularly come over, setting up their easels in the garden where they would paint from nature, working on the fringes of an art history bound up with cubism and abstraction. Stéphane Belzère's artistic heritage is that of 19th century painting, and his biographical heritage is one of apprenticeship, emulation and rivalry with his father, Jürg Kreienbühl [1].
Photography and the scientific study of vision have had a decisive impact on the evolution of the visual arts in that they encouraged abstract art. This orientation did not directly interest Kreienbühl, for whom painting was fundamentally based upon the science of geometry and figuration as it had been practiced since the Renaissance. He did nevertheless recognize that it was essential for a figurative painting to include some abstraction, without which it would only be an illustration. This is why, in the Kreienbühl household, it was forbidden to use a camera as a memory-aid for making a painting. To practice fully the art of painting, the medium was to be used as a way of seeing, a way of transforming the perceptive experience into a representation. Stéphane Belzère would make this point of view his own, often emphasizing codified methods for the act of looking in his work. Beginning in the 1990's, he hailed the body as subject and painting as medium at a time when institutions were partial to a postmodern, semiological approach, favoring the idea of painting as sign [2].
One never paints alone. Belzère's artwork has been forged by devotion as well as by resistance to his artistic heritage. Would the obsession with deterioration and precariousness that's so palpable in Kreienbühl's painting have led to the fostering of a heightened sense of contingency, an awareness of what can't be and of what doesn't need us in order to exist, in his son's work? The answer may lie in the expression of an "interior necessity" that's at the root of Belzère's artistic practice. Shared by symbolist painters such as Arnold Böcklin, but also by Kandinsky, Hodler and Klee, all of whom Belzère admires, the conviction of an "interior necessity" is what stimulates the rigor and commitment of his practice. It guides a conceptual investigation that questions the terms of his painting [3].
In 1990, the year after he graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris (the Fine Art School of Paris), Belzère set up his easel in the basement of the school to paint the old statues and plaster molds leftover from the Rome Prize, which had been piled up beneath the large pipes leading to the boiler room. Cluttered groups of mythological heroes, Roman allegories, figures of Christianity and portrait busts of politicians lay discarded and broken since the student uprisings of May 1968. Their obvious uselessness attests to the passing of trends and ideals, of models and teaching methods. The painter here bears witness to the fragility of artistic traditions subjected to the test of time and memory.
Shortly thereafter, the young graduate settled in Berlin, a city that was still economically depressed and attracting large numbers of people from the East as well as young artists. Belzère began making paintings of the reflection of his nude body in the window of his studio at nightfall. Sculpted by the glare of an overhead lightbulb, his spectral silhouette at first stands out and then merges with that of a tree or the façade of a building, becoming an object among other objects. Belzère is exploring here for the first time the concept of the "mise en abyme", or the placement of the figure in an abyss, a state of endless repetition and timelessness. This concept would come to characterize his future series of paintings, namely the Bocaux anatomiques (Anatomical Jars), painted from the collections of the Natural History Museum of Paris between 1996 and 2005, and the Tableaux Saucisses (Sausage Paintings), an ongoing series begun in 1995 and which represent shelved stacks of preserves in glass jars set up in his studio. As the focus of a long and absorbing study of representation and figuration, these jars literally constitute food for thought for the artist about painting detached from its political and social function. Destined for museum collections and the thoughtful meditation of curators, the paintings might seem to be narcissistic and outmoded objects, or entirely self-contained entities, like bodies whose murder is waiting to be autopsied, their skin smoothed out in formaldehyde for easier examination [4]. In his painting of a larynx in its glass container, Belzère pays tribute to Munch's Scream, but the painting reads more as an impossible cry of deliverance.
Belzère has thus studied the conceptual possibilities of painting in of itself. By inventing a continuum between the organicity of flesh and brushwork to the point of making them inseparable, the artist reveals the power of painting and its expressive intensity. He's developed an approach to painting that can encompass, transform and ultimately transfigure the emotional spectrum ranging from horror to absurdity: "Flesh becomes color and light, the glass container becomes an inexhaustible repository of shapes. [5]" The imposing scale of the Large Jars (les Grands Bocaux), the largest of which measure 250 x 200 cm, pushes the subject to its very limits, transforming these paintings into works of science fiction, that genre which imagines "the world without us. [6]" The exhibition of specimens of organs and tissues evokes the sublime, which in Kantian terms harks back "to what a subjectivity can possess of its own limits and of its own possible annihilation. [7]"
Belzère's unsensual painting is clearly searching for the Absolute, or the sum of all being, because in order to determine that which is "completed", or "perfect", the ultimate state of being must first be considered as a separate entity. The artist found the ideal context for his research when designing the stained-glass windows for the Rodez Cathedral. There's a strong connection between the anatomical shapes that appear suspended in a translucid space inside the glass jars, and the images that he's invented to illustrate episodes from the Bible. Shapes reminiscent of medieval illuminations rise up like weightless columns within the towering verticality of the windows. Christian iconography that touches upon the immateriality of the body and the mystery of the Incarnation have led the artist to explore the graphic possibilities of medical imagery and to incorporate certain images into the architecture of the gothic cathedral [8]. For the uppermost part of the windows, their culminating focal point, he chose to work from an MRI scan of the human brain.
[1] Jürg Kreienbühl asked his son to change his last name when he began his career as a painter. Belzère is the name of Stéphane's maternal grandmother.
[2] Hans Belting: "The notion that pictures are images embodied in media brings our body, a living medium of its own, back into the discussion. Semiotics, one of modernity's great achievements in abstraction, has separated the world of signs from the world of bodies. And signs belong to the cognitive rather than the sensory realm, so much so that in semiotic discourse even pictures often seem to be reduced to iconic signs […]." An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Dunlap, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, United States, 2014, p.11.
[3] Swiss and German painting was of primary importance to Stéphane Belzère's education and has nourished his imagination. Belzère has both French and Swiss nationality. He divides his time between Paris and Basel.
[4] The aspect of the organs and flesh vary from one jar to the next; they can appear distended by the formaldehyde for easier observation or crumpled up like debris, bringing to mind Arman's Garbage Cans from the 1960's, in which litter is accumulated and compressed in jars or under plexiglass.
[5] Stéphane Belzère quoted in "Stéphane Belzère: éloge de l'incarnation" by Philippe Piguet, La Cathédrale de Rodez, les vitraux de Stéphane Belzère, Éditions du Patrimoine, 2008, p.42.
[6] Tristan Garcia, "Le réel n'a pas besoin de nous", Conference at the Banquet d'automne, Lagrasse.
[7] Ibid.
[8] In 2017, Stéphane Belzère also made a frieze for the maternity ward of the Mignot Hospital in Versailles. Forty meters long and fifty centimeters high, this painting on glass further explores his study of transparency, anatomical jars and organic shapes.
