All worked up
Jean-Marc Huitorel
Editions de la Lettre volée, Collection Insert, Bruxelles, 2002

Cézanne was the first to have done away with the artifices of a monocular perspective. It wasn’t that he rejected this perspective, but rather this form of illusion which found its source, not in the logic and economy of the painted surface, but in an external preoccupation, that is to say, in an ideology. Perspective, as invented in the 15th century, was in fact a response to the imperative to conquer the world, the real, more wholly, on which the energy of those times was founded. Forty years after the invention of photography and also breaking with the Impressionists, Cézanne brought about a revival of painting, with its fundamental paradigms of geometry and flatness. With this, he was to both enable the survival of a pictorial practise and a relationship with the world through the very exercise of this practice (perspective included, but by means of an arrangement of planes in space) and open the way for a specific usage for flatness, in other words modernity. However, in 1878, Cézanne the constructor also painted a small work entitled Le Bassin du jas de Bouffan, very rickety in terms of faithfulness to the model, but which reflected the architecture in the water of the pool, enabling a return to painting and its reading in reverse. This has nothing to do with the staggering work of Baselitz. With Baselitz, you turn it round and it works. But Cézanne, with this Cézanne, you turn it round and it almost works, but not quite. Like a painting by Robert Suermondt. But with Suermondt, it’s even more complex and diabolical. It is in fact a highly paradoxical painting which constantly shifts the spectator (here it is not the spectator who makes the painting, it is rather the painting which unmakes the spectator). In front of a painting by Suermondt, one can feel both a great contentment and dissatisfaction. The contentment arises from the great beauty of what is offered up to be beheld; it rests with other things also, to which we shall return. The dissatisfaction, by contrast, forces us to lean to one side, to twist our neck and finally turn the painting round (the reproduction at any rate, as in the exhibition, the position has been decided once and for all). But you are no closer to the answer than before and you find yourself with exactly the same sense of loss, the same temptation. In this sense, Robert Suermondt’s painting is an art of unquenched lust. And even when the diagonal view offers a few openings, one can clearly feel that something, here, is resisting and asserting the self-sufficiency of the painting, like the autarkic relationship that painting often establishes with its viewer.


Furthermore, this work is indistinguishable from the image. Paintings, as we shall see but also and above all the whole of the work. This photographic, cinematographic and videographic attention given to the image was probably strengthened through the company of Cherif and Silvie Defraoui who were his teachers in Geneva and whose teaching has marked many artists. For alongside painting, Robert Suermondt is pursuing the work of a video director and we don’t need to look long at his films (São Paulo for example, but also S.O.L.) to identify the continuity of a universe and the way to apprehend it. Apart from the theme of architecture, which we shall turn to in a moment, we find in painting this incessant movement of planes, which, as we suggested above, destabilises the spectator. For a long time, Suermondt has collected images and in particular views of architecture, but not just that, which he puts together and sticks onto sheets of paper. As Paul Groot pointed out, the relationship to the Atlas by Richter is only superficial. We may be far closer to another atlas, the Mnemosyne of Aby Warburg, by the both formal and semantic link between the images. These images most often come from various magazines, but not exclusively, as he occasionally makes some himself. They belong equally in the high-low inversion as in the rotations from right to left. They operate like a matrix, a memory which we can consult, but also, quite recently, like the objets of an exhibition (under the generic title of Napelm). We find this architectural background in the painting, these memories of images of modernist architectures chosen for their high proportion of white cubes, or Mediterranean to convey the idea of fragility and an ever potential catastrophe. Sometimes also, the images represent something quite different, but they evoke, from near or far, the idea of construction in the broadest sense. In the economy of the painting, they operate less like iconography of architectures than as pure and simple architecture, i.e. like the structuring of the surface, lines of perspective and degrees of depth, which ultimately offer a sense that their position is of little consequence. That also is reminiscent of Cézanne, although clearly in another context, as the painting is relieved of its historicity and offered for the free consultation by history. For aside from this, in the very heart of the work, there is the image, and it is in the articulation of this image culture and its consideration of specific information for painting that in my opinion, the singular quality of Robert Suermondt’s work is to be found. The titles themselves fulfil the function of historical connections or memories, sensations or in some way producers of images. The layering of plans, the vigorous line, the boldly asserted contrasts, the entropic vertigo which seizes anyone who observes these paintings, all of this should have offered these paintings a relief similar to trompe-l’œil, albeit largely abstract. There is nothing of this, neither in the paintings, where the elements of architecture and landscape were highly visible, nor in more recent works. Why then, on the other hand, is there this sensation of absolute and almost smooth flatness? Probably because the relationship between the image effect and the pictorial reality is constant and on the one hand prevents the painting from tending towards pure figuration (whilst retaining a somewhat flattened distance) and on the other from falling under the solitary spells of virtuoso painting.


In more recent paintings, we can see less of the presence of figurative elements, as if the idea of architecture should henceforward only spring from strict painting. As if, by an astonishing reversal, it was no longer the image that should nurture painting but instead painting which should hold the place of primary visual reality. The footholds formed by the transcribed images of photos of architecture are now going to be supported by a stroke of colour. If the touch blends more in the general economy of the painting, Robert Suermondt is also attached, now more than ever, to the articulation of complementary tones, albeit in the attenuation of contrasts, by surrendering to the dominant strength of greens for warmer tones. Painting revisited by the charms of modernist self- sufficiency? Certainly not, for the temptation of the image, to reveal itself more discreetly, is no less present, more encrypted, more allusive. But it is more troubling than that. In a recent exhibition, Suermondt chose to present, not his paintings, but black-and-white photocopies, approximately on the scale of 1 to 1, on poster paper, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, either in the normal sense, or the high in place of the low. Exit painting. Now only a sort of ghost remains, but a talkative ghost, in the form of an image quite disposed to say something, not of the images that it contains, but a piercing memory whose absence soon transforms itself into a loss, this unapproachable and yet so present a thing which we call painting. All worked up.



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