Claude Gazier

Mineralized Pictorial Emotions

“I’m after the picture that I feel, not the picture that I see.”

– Edward Hopper

Introduction

It was in the beginning of December that I visited the atelier of the French painter Claude Gazier in Caluire, a French commune located in the metropolis of Lyon in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. As Lyon was preparing for the 25th edition of the Fête des Lumières or Festival of Lights, a an international event renowned for its extraordinary light installations, I was preparing to meet the painter whose work creates bridges between the 7th art art and narrative figuration, metamorphosing some of the most iconic, ever-lasting film emotions on the painting.

Claude Gazier was born in 1952 in Lyon, where he still lives up to this date. Gazier spent his early childhood in Paris, France, and then in 1956 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with both his parents. After his return to Paris in 1958, he lived near the Louvre Museum, then frequented the studio of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and practiced painting in high school. In 1971, he joined l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in the Architecture section.

During his studies he took an architectural course in the Cévennes, practiced masonry techniques and traveled to Rome where he studied the architectural anamorphosis of the Italian Baroque and discovered the frescoes of Tiepolo. In 1979 he obtained his diploma as a DPLG architect (UP6, Paris La Villette) with a thesis on “architectural trompe-l’oeil”, or visual illusions in architecture intended to trick the eye into perceiving a detail as a three-dimensional object. The architectural eye naturally led Gazier to mural painting and scenography. In 1987, the Cités-Cinés exhibition in Paris entrusted Gazier with the scenography of the New York sector, Many film lovers today remember this exhibition with nostalgia. It marked a turning point in the approach to scenography, investigating the representation of the city in fiction cinema. In Lyon, his hometown, Gazier will create and design theater and film sets.

Chairs from Les Célestins, the emblematic theatre in Lyon that celebrates over 200 years of dramatic art conceived by the architect Gaspard André, hold a particular space in Gazier’s atelier, both as an homage to theater scenography and his hometown. Speaking of his artistic recognition, Gazier refers with great respect to the Gallery Anne-Marie et Roland Pallade in Lyon, a former contemporary art gallery that exhibited his work for almost a decade. In 2004, Ciné Classic produced a documentary film “Claude Gazier – visual artist”, as a beautiful homage to Gazier’s work. Exhibited regularly in France in galleries and institutional places, Gazier’s painting reaches an international audience, and is included in both private and public collections, such as Palestine Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Villa Tamaris Art Center, Eden cinema museum, City of Lyon … Gazier’s work is currently represented by the PARTAGE gallery in Lyon and the Guinet gallery in Vittel, in France.

The Discovery of Edward Hopper

It was in the midst of the 70s, years that marked the immense transformation of Hollywood’s film industry, that Gazier assiduously frequented arthouse cinemas of the Latin Quarter in Paris, strongly marked by the discovery of classic American and French films, as well as those of the New Wave. A turning point in Gazier’s artistic work was the discovery of Edward Hopper in the 1980, an American realist artist who cherished an unique, reciprocal relationship with cinema, using movies as an artistic inspiration and influencing directors such as Hitchcock, Wenders, Jarmusch, Lynch, Antonioni, or De Palma. There are indeed many similarities between Gazier’s and Hopper’s work that deserve to be analysed. Hopper was, for many art critics considered as an ultimate painter of the 20th century’s solitude, painting scenes of cinematographic dramas, creating clues, a state of spirit, with austere, lonely figures crushed by architecture and contradicting points of view. In Gazier’s La Notte from 2009, we can instantly recognize that distinctive spirit of Hopper’s work, whilst Shadows (2016) and Traque (2014) reflect the strong cinematographic psychological tensions, evoking films of Alfred Hitchock.

“Maybe I am not very human – all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house”, was one of Hopper’s famous quotes about light. In Hopper’s paintings, light is practically a language on its own, used to enhance a specific atmosfere and a peculiar emotional state of the characters. In the same way as Hopper, Gazier uses chiaroscuro techniques to give life to his characters. As he explained: “I never managed to find in oil painting that vivid, realistic aspect of the cinematic image”. In Gazier’s paintings there is always a light in the dark, a vibrancy in his shadows, obtained with the use of architectural materials permitting greater depth, such as the use of wet concrete that brings depth and dullness to the color, like in Delikatessen from 1991.

Same as Hopper painted the impressive oil paintings of American landscapes, landscape paintings hold an important space in Gazier’s creative opus. His landscapes are not just nostalgic and romantic, but also cathartic, reinventing a new order and perspective. By mixing casein and sand, the painting obtains a mineral effect, creating changing sensations of light, powdery and atomized perceptions of the air, clouds, trails and fields. We can sense the influence of impressionists and Gerhard Richter in Gazier’s landscape paintings, though his major preoccupation lies in capturing the nuances and vibrations of light, for which the transparency of casein and superimposed colored layers on the silica which previously covers the paintings turned out to be a perfect solution.

Architect of the Cinematographic Memory

Inspired by the French novelist, poet, and filmmaker Gérard Mordillat who described Gazier as a “archeologist of the cinematographic memory” I would be brave enough to call him an “architect of the cinematographic memory”. Gazier not only reveals the images of timeless Hollywood movies, such as A Streetcar named Desire, And God Created Woman, Death in Venice, The Purple Rose of Cairo or Contempt, he engages in a process of transfiguration, in the research of transposition of plastic qualities of a projected image, proposing revisited cinematographic scenes.

The primary idea is to fix a particle of an emotion. To express this idea Gazier opted for that mineral grain, a solid support to “engrave” the floating emotions in our memory : “My intentions to lastingly fix the floating sensations led me to abandon oil painting on canvas. In my research of new supports and techniques to express the stopped movement, the use of a mineral grain quickly became evident, due to its qualities of evoking the film grain”, Gazier explains.

My work since then has explored the depth and blur obtained on these different supports using casein as in the frescoes roughness, dullness, luminosity depending on the size and color of the sands and aggregates Inspiration today comes from both film images and photographs, often in the search for an expression of atmospheric depth for exterior scenes as well as landscapes.” In a proper architectural manner, Gazier “builds” the painting by applying glue to panels on which he sprays glass sand or marble aggregates, thus obtaining a grainy surface similar to mural frescoes. He paints the patterns with a mixture of colored pigments and casein. The result is a grainy image that sublimates the memories of fascinating architecture and mythical films.

Gazier’s painting Dom Juan is inspired by the Franco-Belgian-Canadian television film Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1965), by Marcel Bluwal, based on Molière’s comedy Dom Juan first presented in 1665. Dom Juan is a free man, to the great displeasure of his valet Sganarelle who watches, helplessly, the race of his master towards perdition. The faces have no expression, they have been blurred with intention. The accent is on the arrogant posture of Dom Juan and the powerless position of his valet. They are both insignificant in comparison to the overpowered architecture: the royal saltwork of Arc-et-Senans, located in Doubs in Burgundy-Franche-Comté region.

The painting Monika is an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s movie from 1953 with Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson. With the soft blue, violet and green pigments, the chiaroscuro effect, and grainy aspect of sand on panel Gazier captured all the beauty and nostalgia of a brief love story, a wild and idyllic life of the two lovers on the island of Ornö. On a more metaphysical level, painting in sand honors the transitory nature of life. It recognizes and celebrates non-permanence, like the one of an impossible love doomed to failure.

The painting Portrait of a Lady, inspired by Jane Campion’s movie from 1996 with Nicole Kidman, demonstrates the impressive presence of the architecture, due to the weight of agglomerated marble fragments. The crypts of the Farnese Palace in Caprarola have an almost wall mural effect, with blurred contours, rich shade palette that varies from violet to brown, and a sober, distinguished overall feeling. The granular minerals create a pictorial material which blurs the contours, diffusing and returning the light which they reflect and which appears to emanate from them. We can compare this effect with Sfumato technique, cherished among the painters of the Renaissance, that resulted in paintings without clear borders, creating subtly graduated transitions between areas of differing color and tonal value. The graininess of the surface enhances the illusion of atmospheric depth without compromising the structural integrity of the objects within a painting. ” It is about playing the contradiction between the affirmation of the grainy materiality of the sandblasted surface and the search for the illusion of depth”, adds Gazier.

Stepping away from cinema references, we arrive to probaby to Gazier’s ultimate homage to the masterpiece of naive art in France, the The Ideal Palace (also called the Ideal Palace of Postman Cheval), a monument built in Hauterives (France) by the postman Ferdinand Cheval, from 1879 to 1912. This monument, built entirely by a single man, measures 12 meters high and 26 meters long, with various pieces (stones collected on the paths for the most part) assembled with lime, mortar, cement and reinforced by metallic frames. With the same laborious tenacity as Cheval, we can observe Gazier’s work on light and depth while building his painting Alice and Ferdinand, with casein on sand. With this painting Gazier transports us to the world of pictorial fantasies, similar to what has been described by Pierre Souchaud in his critique about Gazier’s transfigurative painting: “Claude Gazier’s paintings are windows open to delicious and infinite reveries, and one can wonder about the nature of their mysterious power of fascination or bewitchment.” (Souchaud, 2012).

Blue Series

With Vertigo, Hitchock’s movie from 1957 with Kim Novak and James Stewart, we enter in the “blue phase” of Gazier’s work, in which through the icons of Hollywood’s Golden age Gazier portrays the lustful aspect of the human condition: desires, deceptions, passions, revenge, jealousy, obsession. In Vertigo, the central theme is psychological obsession, it is a cinematic poem that plunges into the darkest recesses of human fear and desire. To isolate this profound universal emotion of lust and desire, Gazier covered the faces with intense atmospheric bleu created with lime. In this way, he completely immortalizes the artists that are not humans, but figures. What remains human is the universality of the cinematographic emotion. The blue, unified faces of Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Michèle Morgan or Brigitte Bardot are not the representation of a Hollywood’s dream-machine, but more likely universal representations of female aspects of love and desire. The fragments of agglomerated marble give a specific weight to the image, and bring the aspect of realness to the characters.

© Claude Gazier: Starting from the left: Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner, 86 x 75 cm, lime and wax on marble aggregates, 2003, Gabin-Morgan, 60 x 60 cm, lime and wax on marble aggregates, 2004, Ingrid Bergman-Humphrey Bogart, 60 x 60 cm, 2001, Brigitte Bardot-Michel Piccoli in Contempt, 100 x 100 cm, lime and wax on marble aggregates, 1999

Anamorphoses

We will conclude Gazier’s extremely dense creative opus with anamorphoses, a perspective that appears distorted in some conditions but accurate in others. The word “anamorphosis,” derived from the Greek word for transformation first emerged in the 17th century. While the origins of anamorphic art are not entirely clear, artists Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer likely crafted some of the first anamorphic designs. The search for the evocation of the third dimension was a subject that Gazier studied during his architectural studies. Focusing on the technique of the “trompe l’oeil”, accelerations of perspectives and anamorphoses were studied as techniques for the illusion of depth. Gazier created both mirror and perspective anamorphoses, one of which is today the property of the city of Lyon, adorning the corner of the streets Cotte and Narvick, in the 8th arrondissement of Lyon.

Regardless of the chosen medium, Gazier’s preoccupation remains intact: it is about permanently capturing the vanished presence, reactivating a memory or a distant emotion. Playing with optical illusions Gazier creates a play where space rules over the viewer, a sensation of spatial dizziness, like in the Play Time, a huge carpet reproducing the scene from the Jacques Tati’s movie Play Time; that completely breaks the laws of balance depending on the angle of the viewer’s gaze. This anamorphosis became in 2018 part of the Collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palestine in Paris.

This brief overview serves no justice to the variety and density of Gazier’s artistic opus. What the external observer like myself is left with, is a panoply of cinematographic references, an alternative view of architectural perspectives in painting, and the potential of natural elements like sand and marble in creating new dimensions of magical cinematic illusions.

More about Claude Gazier:

https://www.claudegazier.com

Instagram: @claudegazier

Gallery Partage: https://www.partage.fr/blogs/artistes/claude-gazier

Sources:

Textes critiques:

https://www.claudegazier.com

Anne- Marie et Roland Pallade Art Contemporain: Claude Gazier, catalogue, https://www.pallade.net/artistes/claude-gazier/

L’envers du décor, Claude Gazier, Dante Ferretti, Grande Exposition d’été 2013, Hostellerie de Saint-Hugues Ville de Cluny

Claude Gazier

Mineralized Pictorial Emotions

Introduction

The Discovery of Edward Hopper

Architect of the Cinematographic Memory

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Claude Gazier

Mineralized Pictorial Emotions

Introduction

The Discovery of Edward Hopper

Architect of the Cinematographic Memory

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