Painter captures the space between us
By John E. Mitchell
French painter Jean-Noel Chazelle’s paintings are larger than life -- both physically and conceptually -- and the artist is finally poised to unleash them for viewing this summer.
Chazelle’s work is currently the main attraction in the NoAma Gallery (in the former Delftee building on Route 2), the result of two summer residencies that had him produce numerous oversized works that benefit from the space of the old mill buildings that now house them.
Chazelle’s paintings mix science with philosophy and poetry into a visual alchemy. With a background in performance, he has fashioned a series of paintings that move as much as any human before a crowd -- and change with that movement.
Chazelle’s paintings are huge acrylics on acrylic and Plexiglas, large swashes that transform in a viewer’s perception depending on their placement in the room, the viewer’s vantage point and the direction of the light moving through them. His work changes throughout the day, and the perfect way to view it is through several trips over a 24-hour period. The works are little slices of reality, captured to be viewed by human eyes but still beholden to time.
"I want to work on the retina and the conception of reality," Chazelle in an interview this week. "First I present something that seems to be abstract, and at last when you’re really into it, you discover the combination of the form. I’m talking about a transparency which is in between all of us but is in fact of the exact same matter as what composes us -- and we never imagine it."
Chazelle embraces science as a prime component in his work -- not merely for the data it provides, but also for the beauty of its conceptual guidance.
"I really think all these researchers have a poetic part that is much more important than what we can figure out," he said.
Optics and the nature of matter are of particular interest to the painter, particularly the way light is manipulated in order to shape the way we see matter. One fascination for Chazelle is the idea that there is no blank space on the quantum level, that everything is filled with matter -- and that what lies between two humans is really sub-atomic particles fashioned from the very same material as humans.
The universe itself is a mass of space stuff pierced by light.
Within that crammed universe, movement is a natural state for particles, but our brains and eyes quantify a reality that is settled and far from kinetic. Chazelle’s wish is to reveal what our brains refuse to allow our eyes to see -- widen our perception on a sub-atomic level in order to do the same on an emotional and intellectual one.
"We’re so much frightened that we like to define the surface of what we see as not moving, really stable, when it is not," he said. "Surface is in fact moving, vibrating, making very strange things, but our brain stabilizes that. I think the more we are going to grow and develop humanity, the more our perception is going to grow, and I just think the weight, the equilibrium that we have, is something that is ruled by fear."
Chazelle relates this idea of atomic perspective -- the things unseen because of our place as middle-ground observers of the reality. Humans can see neither the inner nor outer world -- it’s his hope that his paintings work like strings, connecting a larger vision of the universe with a much smaller one, drawing comparisons between those two perspectives and placing man somewhere in there, lost between the two.
"I wanted to have a different vision than a man who was walking on the Earth and looking at everything from the level of the man," he said. "I think we have to watch at things at another level, a cosmogenic level, not only at a man’s level. It’s nearer reality to watch things at a cosmos level than at a man’s level."
Chazelle likens the job of a painter with that of a physicist -- as well as a poet -- and thinks specifically back to one researcher of his acquaintance whose work perfectly captures his own vision of what a painter does. The scientist was developing a form of matter to be sent up into space in order to trap particles and then bring them back down to Earth for analysis.
"I was thinking that a painter must be the same -- not only a trap of particles, but a trap of emotions and reality," Chazelle said. "I really think we are an interface between the cosmos and humanity."
It’s certainly no mistake that his paintings resemble gigantic versions of the small slides that scientists put under microscopes to observe the hidden world. These are his slices of reality seized for presentation -- and contemplation. The work plays on the reality of what perception actually is -- that two people can look at the same thing and not see the same data within it. Chazelle views this as separate but perpendicular journeys toward a similar end -- a clearer reality.
"The way we symbolize the cross section is going to give the impression that we see different things," he said, "but if we talk more together about all this perception that we have, we’re going to find finally that perception is different for everyone, but the message, the essence of where we are going to is exactly the same."
The integral action for Chazelle, though, is to remove the reality from anything that would taint contemplation of it -- that is, the context that humans put on it. He characterizes this as "putting people in jail mentally" -- that is, defining something or someone early on and never swaying from that original definition. Chazelle sees that as limiting.
"I really wanted to go outside the manipulation of history and concepts, because they just regulate our vision and they make us really sad about reality because that’s not enough from what we could consider," he said.
He considers his paintings just one tool of perception that can be applied all through life, rather than the only portals to the "real reality," as he calls it. What is true for his paintings is true for the whole of life, you just have to get started looking beyond the surface and then never look at things the old way again.
"I think the same when you are on the countryside or whatever magnificent place you can be," Chazelle said, "and if you see it by the morning, by the afternoon, by the night, your perception is going to be different though that’s the same rock you are looking at. Maybe it’s the beginning of learning what we see and we don’t want to see because it’s still the same."