Formes particulaires — Marie Cini Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 12 → February 16, 2013

Jérémie Delhome, possibilities of Form

In 1953, giving up any description and any dialogue, merely imagining the dialogue of beings at the extreme of nothingness, Beckett published a long monologue, aptly named “The Unspeakable”, thus marking the evolution towards a form of writing which is at once economical and garrulous. As James Joyce did before him, he illustrates the workings of mechanisms dissolving consciousness and its languages in a temporal structure that appears as fragmented, causing all his works, characters and stories to be subjected to a unrelenting process of reduction.

Something similar is at work in Jérémie Delhome’s painting and drawing. According to him, it originates in the “scales” he practices — like any composer seeking structures and signs — so that certain forms emerge which he incorporates into his repertoire. The ones that he selects and become the very subject-matter of painting or drawing, the motif which must be given shape and form, then substantiate the execution of a specific protocol which only varies in the medium used. Jérémie Delhome creates a kind of restrained stencil through which, following a series of applications, a form is materialized.

The series of drawings that are presented at Marie Cini’s gallery is a work made from carbon paper which he used as a pigment by taking a sheet of paper for each successive layer within a stencil cut in tracing-paper sheets. This results in all kinds of imprints, sometimes superimposed, allowing him to play with density and value, giving the form thickness and volume similar to that of an object evolving in three-dimensional space. In this respect, sculpture and drawing are singularly close to each other and participate all the more in the illusion of relief that Delhome conjures up with the light effects of the pigment, thus questioning the relation of form and content.

The reduction principle that orients the artist’s approach is associated to his painstaking listing of elementary but unidentifiable shapes, which put forward the fundamental possibilities of form, whether painted or drawn. As with Beckett or Joyce, the idea of reduction in Delhome is not negatively connoted because the point is to bring the form to its simplest state. Reducing, in fact, brings closer to the eye. It operates through a synthetic process which favors the element as opposed to the whole and whose purpose allows for a liberated evolution from one singular unit to the next. In effect, reduction ensures that each shape maintains its uniqueness and each work its mystery — as Michel Onfray puts it, "any painting worthy of the name contains an enigma”; that is, of course, any painting, drawing or simply work of art.

Philippe Piguet, December 2012