I have known Ang\u00e8le for many years, and the artistic friendship that has gradually developed between us has given rise to true and candid exchanges. Discovering a work in progress, however, is always a moment when the strict intimacy of production meets the reality of the gaze and the nudity of words. We do not invite ourselves into an artist\u2019s studio: we enter through the narrow door. We then experience that which is gradually revealed to us. Few words are needed, just scattered points of view that fade away on seeing works freshly hung on irregular, blotchy, and unevenly lit walls. Where well-ordered rows of paint sit on a shelf and where, spread out on a table, are small, strange supports covered in many shades of grey. Where brushes and spatulas are arrayed on a bench and wooden rods that served to paint the surfaces rest in a haphazard jumble. Studio production is invariably fascinating, intriguing, generous, and little voiced. No more was needed to engage in an altogether friendly and curious conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_DSC9223.jpg\")
From here on out, I will have to put words to what was undeniably seen. On the one hand, words gleaned from Ang\u00e8le\u2019s studio\u2014words from the raw reality of making. They are without artifice. I purposefully gathered them for the value of their candidness and attempted to group them as evidence. At the computer keyboard, written words echoing the words spoken by Ang\u00e8le come forward in a wholly different register. The words written on her work have at times the advantage of being courteous and distant, sensitive, composed of arabesques. They also have their steep and sudden spikes. In their divergence, however, they risk a rapprochement\u2014one the reader will undoubtedly perform. In a magnificent publication titled Ang\u00e8le Verret: Tableaux: Des \u00e9tendues de mirages \/ The Extent of Mirages<\/em> (2011), the late gallerist Jean-Claude Rochefort had also opted for an artist\u2019s voice in a dialogue with Verret\u2019s production: \u201cThese images are like mirages<\/em>; they come into being, become visible only under certain conditions.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Jean-Claude Rocheford, Ang\u00e8le Verret: tableaux: Des \u00e9tendues de mirages \/ The Extent of Mirages<\/em>, trans. Michael Bailey (Montr\u00e9al: Galerie Roger Bellemare, 2011), 65.<\/span> I humbly grope my way forward amid the \u201cmiraculous mirages\u201d found in Ang\u00e8le\u2019s latest production, searching for \u201clong-known conditions, long-since familiar.\u201d But also in the hope of capturing, for a brief moment, its instability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ang\u00e8le Verret:<\/strong> In my new series, …tout \u00e0 coup… depuis toujours…<\/em>, made up of twenty-seven mid-sized, thirty-six-centimetre-square paintings, I used the same procedure I\u2019ve employed for a long time, which consists of placing the support on a table and working it horizontally. I used round rods of wood, plastic, or metal of various diameters and lengths. By carefully rolling them in a substance composed of a matte acrylic medium lightly tinted titanium white, the trace generated by the gesture of almost \u201cunrolling\u201d the whitish substance onto the painting surface gives me the impression of producing a pulsing rhythm. Then I have to wait patiently for everything to dry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mario C\u00f4t\u00e9:<\/strong> A work bench, a horizontal surface, unconventional tools, an incalculable number of repetitive gestures, and a long wait encapsulate the singular technique that Ang\u00e8le has developed over the last thirty years. In this context, how does one bear witness to the act of creating paintings in such a singular way in a commentary that emerges from outside, after the fact? Such an undertaking involves modestly identifying a few intuitive insights from a constantly active thought process, and experimenting myself with certain considerations that, far from being impressions, are motifs that will help build a tableau of ideas in the form of \u201cconcomitant constellations,\u201d to borrow an expression from Sigmund Freud. A fictional dialogue, built on topics that arise in front of the paintings, in order to interweave, from scattered theoretical notes, the ramifications of a reflection articulated between the painter and the one composing this text. Then, wait patiently for everything to take shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AV:<\/strong> I\u2019ve always placed great importance on preparing the supports. They are currently made up of a plywood surface (Russian cherry) or of low-density material. First step: I use a spatula to apply multiple coats of white gesso. Each one is carefully sanded to produce a smooth, flawless surface. Second step: I add a few layers of black gesso, sometimes with the addition of white. Most often, I apply these last layers with a brush, making sure to never leave any mark that would show pressure from the tool. Exceptionally, for the new series, I used a small roller with very short bristles in order get a fine texture, which helps create the blurred effect in the final rendition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MC:<\/strong> First and foremost, the painstaking preparation of the surfaces reveals the complex modalities of the act of painting. This decisive phase of priming the supports consequently places the artist in an ambivalent, unstable, and floating position with respect to follow-up on the project. The artist may anticipate the consequences, but he or she will invest considerable time circumscribing the exploratory pictorial space to come, as if to counter this fragility of the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The painting thus finds its specific and potential area of expertise. Skilfully rooted in the experience of prior paintings, a new space gradually comes into play and welcomes unimaginable avenues. One could even say that, at this inaugural moment, the painting\u2019s production almost prophetically encompasses all other phases of work in the studio. At this preliminary and crucial step, in a spiraloid motion, the artist confronts: a \u201cfeeling-sensing\u201d (ressentir-pressentir<\/em>), a making-conceiving (fabriquer-concevoir<\/em>), leading then to a \u201cbeing-indefinitely-watched\u201d (\u00eatre-regard\u00e9-ind\u00e9finiment<\/em>), three modes in a permanent process of adjustment, since advances and retreats will follow one another throughout the in-studio work. Thus, a feeling-sensing imbued with intentionality is repeatedly put to the test. Making-conceiving then comes up against the constant resistance of the materials, so that, finally, the being-indefinitely-watched bursts out before a thing that has become pictorial, metamorphosing itself into an experience of the gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AV:<\/strong> For as long as I can remember, photography has always fascinated me, even if I\u2019m not a photographer. My family had a box of old photos. I loved rummaging among those images. I remember that the negatives, the photographic film of inverted blacks and whites, especially caught my attention. Looking at all that conjured in me the question of the identity of the photographed subject, the who, the where, the when. Today, strangely, I imagine that people looking at my paintings might experience the same type of fascination. Maybe they\u2019re trying to figure out what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MC:<\/strong> There is in visual experience the conviction that the painting is addressed to us and that it is speaking to us. We are really before a thing that calls upon memories, resemblances, or imaginary filiations. But at the same time, these analogies that spring up unannounced in the present are imperfect, incomplete, even foreign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the painting \u2026tout \u00e0 coup\u2026 depuis toujours\u2026 no<\/sup> 4<\/em>, we see a diaphanous, horizontally streaked surface that lets highlights and openings come through on previous coats. Everything appears to be bathed in an indistinct, milky substance that seems to be determinedly waiting to take shape. A thin, delicate depth is created even as a rich ambiguity is conveyed. But this is all illusion. This simulation of space is confirmed by a dry surface, without the thickness and grain that might have justified the impression. And yet, the resemblance to a dilapidated wall or time-worn photographic film misleads the inattentive eye. Thus, a kind of uncertainty settles in our perception: is what I see really what is looking at me? Does what I feel on seeing the painting correspond to what the painting wishes to show me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AV:<\/strong> One day, I was even told that painting without texture is photography. Moreover, that I wanted to deceive my audience, since for them, indeed, it was obviously not painting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n MC:<\/strong> As if the instance of the photograph allowed for creating a path that could lead to discovering the sensory anticipation of the painting\u2019s origin. In fact, a painting is but the rumpled mask of the photograph. Freud\u2019s essay \u201cThe \u2018Uncanny\u2019\u201d (1919) remains blisteringly relevant today. To confront the known with that which appears: \u201cThe uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Sigmund Freud, \u201cThe \u2018Uncanny,\u2019\u201d in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works<\/em>, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 220.<\/span> Let\u2019s not forget that the phenomenon of the uncanny also calls upon the motif of the double, of similar appearances, and is a form of the repetition of the same. One need only recall the feeling of anxiety that can be elicited by repetitive dream states. Georges Didi-Huberman mentions how this essay of Freud\u2019s wholly describes what he calls an \u201caffective atmosphere\u201d: \u201cThe uncanny is disorienting, both in space and upon uttering its name. The disorientation is linked not only to the experience of a strange and unlocatable place, but also to its very designation, which takes us between the two poles of ambivalence, the \u2018never seen\u2019 and the \u2018already known.\u2019\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Georges Didi-Huberman, Brouillards de peines et de d\u00e9sirs<\/em> (Paris: Les \u00c9ditions de Minuit, 2023), 422 (our translation)<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n What we glean from these brilliant theoretical intuitions are the passages, movements, and relationships that they may create, and not the expression of the felt, which, in practical terms, undoubtedly testifies to an incompletion, a lack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole \u2026tout \u00e0 coup\u2026 depuis toujours\u2026<\/em> series awakens in us this impression of seeing, but also of not being subject to what the painting conveys as an image. Must we be surprised by the strange spectre that traverses the horizontal scan in painting no<\/sup> 3<\/em>, like a shadow over a bed of bulrushes combed by the waters washed up onto a shore like a shipwreck after high tide<\/em>? Yet no poetic image can exhaust the painting. For there subsists just a mere, fine, chalky layer drawn by rudimentary tools moving over a square surface and creating accidental deposits. The painting can now be resolved solely by becoming an infinite projection of words and images that will find their adequate articulation only in the vastness of their own evocations. As philosopher \u00c9liane Escoubas so justly writes, \u201cThe painting produces my gaze, creates it; in a sense, it invents a gaze for me. My gaze upon a painting comes to me from the painting. The work is always in the process of being born under the gaze it is giving birth to.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - \u00c9liane Escoubas, \u201cLa partition du visible: Plasticit\u00e9, rythme, \u0153uvre,\u201d in De la diff\u00e9rence des arts<\/em>, ed. Jean Lauxerois and Peter Szendy (Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 1997), 121 (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is under these conditions that the painting becomes a being-indefinitely-watched and that it initiates complex subjective machinations and terrible positionings of the subject. Nonetheless, if the painting addresses the spectator so insistently, the painter can make this invocation of the gaze possible only by doggedly focusing on the making-conceiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AV:<\/strong> On a small support barely thirty-six centimetres square, my hands control the entire painting surface more easily. Although accidents can\u2019t be avoided, as some areas dry more quickly than others, motifs of varying importance arise inside the image that is being made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MC:<\/strong> In fact, once the painting is exhibited, it will become a device in which we will no longer recognize the traces of the tool used to paint it. Above all, it will lead to the observation that the eye was indeed misled. Ang\u00e8le, in her way, relies on the expectation that a deposit of the material will produce the desired effect, while unfortunately not knowing what real impact these manipulations will produce. The painting sets in motion a machination of the gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The making of the painting encapsulates within itself a whole process of thought and discovery. By relying on technical skill, the painter does not want to elucidate the how<\/em> so much as to manifestly indicate the power of thought in action. This desire for intensity is driven by indissociable intuitions, felt and sensed, apparitions of an impromptu kind and, as in a liberating movement, an allowance for the utmost delight of those who will be contemplating it. To be philosophical about it, all the words you have just read are made possible only by the patient and vigilant conveyance toward the visible performed in the paintings of Ang\u00e8le Verret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n***<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_\u2026ettoutacoup\u2026depuistoujours\u2026no.3_GLH08772-_Photo-Guy-LHeureux.jpg\")
\u2026 tout \u00e0 coup\u2026 depuis toujours\u2026 no <\/sup>3<\/em>, 36 \u00d7 36 cm, 2023.
Photo: Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist
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\u2026 tout \u00e0 coup\u2026 depuis toujours\u2026 no <\/sup>4<\/em>, 36 \u00d7 36 cm, 2023.
Photo: Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_DSC9680.jpg\")
![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_DSC9706.jpg\")
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![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_Dispositiondesvoiles2_2020_185_1.jpg\")
Disposition des voiles (2)<\/em>, 92 \u00d7 276 cm, 2020.
Photos: Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_Dispositiondesvoiles2_2020_185_2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ang\u00e8le](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CHR_Cote_Angele-Verret_Dispositiondesvoiles2_2020_185_3.jpg\")
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