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Francis ECK, SOLAR EFFERVESCENCES
GERARD XIRUGUERA
Pictorial Analysis published
in Magazine « Cimaise » N° 33 - Nov. Dec. 1994 - Paris - France
Amongst the artists of the 80’s, all didn’t fall into step creating savage figures based on urban graffiti, borrowing from Negro art or comic strips, having a voluntary primitivism facture. Not all of them gave into temptations of a “cultivated” painting, inlayed with mythological citations or to the cries for renewal of a suffering abstraction, so called analytical, nor to the more recent combination made by many young artists, between the figure, grasped in bits and pieces and abstract art as their medium.
In their confrontation with reality, certain painters chose to keep to their own directive line from the beginning, tirelessly interrogating their uncertainties of the visible, refining synthesis from the problematic. Such is Francis Eck’s case, who understood how to make his well-earned step last and gradually find the inner strength necessary for unsheathing his writings. In so doing, concentrating on the intensity of those accords and gathering the maximum amount of freed energy, he was able to form his own vocabulary that made his impact and cohesion “by refusing the suitable arrangement”. As for his painting, in spite of a methodical thinking that steadied juxtaposed masses, it didn’t encounter its plainsong until the rebellious movement of its components. But beyond these shaky trembling forms that allusively governed the flux, it is the sliding depth of the substance and its crystallisation powers that determined the musicality of this art, both lively and flexible.
Consequently, Francis Eck uses knife to structure a more solar-like than tormented rhythm that condenses, mixes, and matches, concretizing a shifting touch and dominated by sharpened gestures. In his boiling surfaces, where large lacunars zones breathe, the heavily layered areas begin to move, soft and oily, exploding into several undefined centres. The spread frontally, horizontally or vertically, in a chain of solid petrified ramifications by an alert and prudent hand that simultaneously deconstructs and reconstructs the painting. Without altering the global legibility of the design, this sketched filigree work into a common rhythmic sequence is what constitutes the framework.
Thus, there isn’t any question, in the accidental areas of ardent coloration, of evacuating the subject in an acrid density of a founding substance, even if at first sight, the referent gives way to the incessant comings and goings of the values placed in perspective rather than to similitude.
Nevertheless, the titles of the works help us immediately, if the need arises, to satisfy our geographical and sensory point of reference. “A Caribbean Ballad”, “The Trade Winds at Dusk”, “Between Heaven and Hearth”, carry us along once again as we go through these aggregations of tormented substances, in the wake of these terrestrial, aquatic and windy climates, where the fragrances and savours hang about in the small islands of the Caribbean.
Thus, we’ve now understood that Francis Eck lives on one of these islands that the numbed Parisian, living in a chilling environment, dreams about. A teacher in the beginning, he decides to totally plunge into painting. Working comfortably as a goal, he moves to Saint Martin, an island in the West Indies, away from the theoretical tribulations of the art milieu. His surroundings inspire him, impregnate him, and in his studio, he recomposes the landscapes and atmospheres he imagines. Accustomed to open spaces, he is unable to conceive a staunch boundary between figuration and abstraction. He prefers to keep us, far from obsolete arguments, the complicity between the concealed and the identifiable, not forgetting that “there is always a subject, whether we like it or not” as de Stael said. And this topic, that we might, in a thoughtless way, think has vanished, always interferes in the landscapes induced for the spectator’s subjectivity. For instance, in “The Cliff with Birds”, we sense emptiness, both up and downhill, the emptiness of a sky, slightly perturbed and then the emptiness of a shore, spread out at the foot of an impending lattice made of tight and closed planes, of which an intricate syncopation supports the vibrant architecture of the embankments. Built on the same principles, “Stormy Sky” provides dramatization of the scene, haloed with muffled nocturnal passages that convey incandescent strokes of lightning for their central axis.
There are no gratuities in these effervescent and contrasting exchanges: everything here is perfectly assembled, measured, and tuned. Each form appears to be dependant upon the other; no chromatic flow, neither broken nor continuous, can be singularized within the context, and, to this, add an obvious harmony and elegance. Here, one could suppose a well-schooled thinking, but reality of personal experience mixed with an overpowering conviction, sweeps and overcomes any school of thought or hierarchy, merely enhancing the rejuvenating joy of a painter.
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