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Francis ECK, A mastery of lyricism
Gérard Xuriguéra – 1995 April
Translated by Robert Butler
In the eighties, the return to the subject, whose regenerative impact on a cold reductive artistic production is well known, revealed a generation of young painters of a caustic mentality and it also allowed many other artists who had never renounced their pursuit of the real to emerge from the long purgatory in which they had been confined by the ostracism of formalist hegemonies.
Firmly entrenched in the world of the senses, but with the qualities of a vision connected to the underlying nature of things, Francis Eck's methods, since his early days, have not departed from his concentration on the subject fertile source of all retinal visions, the reality only being the lure which draws to it the subjectivity of the painter and that of the onlooker. Eck, in fact, unlike a number of his peers, who were less assured of the viability of their practice, was not tempted by the chimeras of an abstraction bent on revival, nor by minimalist and conceptual diversions. Faithful to his initial options, devoid of certainties but full of fervour, he has continually kept his attention focused on what is alive around him, in his familiar environment.
This attitude can be better understood if we briefly consult his biography. Originally from Alsace, after a short career as a teacher, he decided to settle in Saint-Martin, in the Lesser Antilles. Far away from the chills of his native region, he discovered flavours hitherto unknown to him, a new way of living, of understanding other people, and soon made the island topography of his chosen exile his own. Then, from an initial approach exploring what his eyes perceived, reinforced by an innate inclination to imbue himself with ambient sensations he reconstructed them more in their essence than in their physical appearance, having once absorbed them and distilled them by sifting them through his memory. It is through this active-introspective phenomenon that he interprets the great rhythms of the universe, by holding onto only their dominant forces. However if his scenic variations, which respect the innate tempo of each chosen site, glorify the space in its own light and make his gifts as a colorist sing in tune with them, the themes targeted, arched m their powerful subtle musculature do not, in spite of their immediate identification, serve as a vehicle for any allegiance to the referent but set in motion a laying bare of the structures, whose metamorphoses and outlines are confined to what is essential.
This tendency towards simplification, which might lead us to deduce that figuration has become a pretext here, is contradicted by the visceral and mental attraction exerted on the artist by the flux of nature. Moreover, for him, the divisions between abstraction and figuration, obsolete for some today, do not offer water-tight barriers, to the extent that they cancel each other out the moment the pictural object is recorded. And this object, whose deferred truth turns out to be even more significant, because it only takes account of the skeleton of the model, always presupposes an emotional dislocation. Consequently, by eliminating superfluous details the total sensory participation of the painter is heightened. "We lack the right word, writes George Steiner, to denote the extraordinary energy, the extraordinary mastery of instinct, the organised summoning of intuition, which are the distinctive marks of the artist".
This vital impetus, based on allegory and not, of course, on narrative, destroys nothing, unlike the expressionists, who overturn and distort the motif so as to reconstruct it in the obsessional torment of their gesture of exorcism. With Eck, one notes neither the dissemination of violence, nor undue dramatisation, nor the warding off of pain, but a technique that is direct, stimulating and resonant, in harmony with his innermost nature, which implies, certainly, the idea of sacrifice, concomitant with ardour of temperament, but whose shaken centrifugal foundations never suffer irreversible ravages.
To some extent, without seeing restrictive connotations there, we have, in this chain of thrilling exchanges, painting of atmosphere, infused with every glint of sunlight, with all the fractious winds, at the juncture of the temperate waters of the Caribbean and a myriad of fellow countries. Painting that is concentrated and dissipated, animated and sometimes solemn, at once imprecise and minutely detailed, radiant and controlled, stripped of the received notions of the picturesque, where dream and reality give off the same aroma of precariousness and lastingness. Delving into this naturalist register, often bordered with solitude - man is barely evoked by indistinct structures summarily conjured up - Francis Eck enrols himself into the extremely diverse tradition of contemporary European landscape. "One never does anything but reinvent what is" notes Fautrier "reconstruct with nuances of emotion the reality which has become incorporated into the matiere, the form, the colour, products of the moment, changed into that which does not change".
To articulate this open style, which owes nothing to imprecision, in spite of the movement that is felt to be rapid spontaneous, ample and generous, directed by jarring accumulated conjunctions of forms and spasmodic outpourings Eck relies on an architectonic organization of elements, made up of interwoven moving and supported masses, which in turn overlap each other, are superimposed, clash, lengthen or contract without breaking the reflating web of the framework.
On an adjacent side, complementary in color and light, the matière which is dominant, compact, smooth, delicately stratified, or divided into contiguous blocks, with effectively planed coatings, becomes part of the substance and meaning of the image.
In so doing with vigorous jumps in clear-cut chromatic contrasts, supported by a succession of nimble planished touches, reconciling the extremes, Eck unites the lyricism of the texture of his work and the sobriety of his constructive thought. Whether one takes the horizontal materialist interweaving of Traces of evolution , the limpid almost monochrome and unobtrusively pigmented sky of "Portions of space, the shadowy overlays of "Sky at Night", the "Cliff with birds" buttressed on a curious stony accumulation, the slow and barely perceptible movements of "Trade winds at dusk", the interactive mixing of flying forms in Wind , the desolate areas of "Frozen horizons", the finely shaded grisaille of "Morning mists" or the transparencies of "Breaking point", one finds the same supple organisation of the surface, the same light, sometimes piercing, sometimes dull, the same lacunary silence, the same metaphorical resonances, as one experiences the significance of the changing of the seasons and the ever-present attraction to the landscape.
Moreover if this daring enterprise reflects initially a look of serenity, on the other hand, by its desire to glorify nature in its original beauty, it seems to bear witness to the dangers that are liable to destabilise it, by the device of progressive disquietude, to which men simultaneously aspire and submit.
But in this constantly evolving work, beyond inevitable stylistic relationships is established painting of sensibility which brings out the pre-eminence of effusion. Bonnard reminds us of this: “The painter of sensibility produces a closed world: the painting, which is a little like a book, communicating his concerns V wherever it is placed. One imagines this artist spending a lot of time doing nothing but looking within and without himself. He is a rare bird".
Gérard Xuriguéra
Translated by Robert Butler
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